


You'll Need No Castles

by Nerissa



Category: Princess Protection Program (2009)
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1920s, F/F, Friends to Lovers, High School, Mutual Pining, genderswapped minor character, passing references to period-typical homophobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-17
Updated: 2017-12-17
Packaged: 2019-02-10 08:39:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 35,240
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12908271
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nerissa/pseuds/Nerissa
Summary: In late summer of 1926, unnoticed by most of the world, the island kingdom of Costa Luna fell to a neighboring dictator.Thanks to the machinations of an obscure international syndicate, the princess escaped . . . and for some reason they thought she'd be safe in New York.They were mostly right.





	You'll Need No Castles

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Anthusiasm (HalfwayDecentFanfiction)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/HalfwayDecentFanfiction/gifts).



The Port of New York was the biggest, busiest thing Rosalinda Fiore had ever seen in her life. The cavernous pier at the foot of the gangplank resounded with the voices of the whole wide world, some languages she had never learned—she had learned several—and so many people she could hardly tell where one ended and the next began.

And they _pushed_.

She was not used to being pushed, but then she was not used to any of this. She committed the unwritten sin of stopping to stare. New York undertook to knock that urge out of her in a hurry. Somebody jostled her from behind and carried on his way without so much as a “pardon me.” Somebody else—she flinched—trod on her foot and she cried out.

At once came a warm, solid presence behind her and the comfort of a hand at the elbow. A voice, just as warm, cut through the din as the speaker put his mouth close to her ear.

“You all right?”

“Yes. Yes, I am . . . all right. Thank you.” She looked up, grateful for the reserved concern of the man she’d met just three weeks ago. Major Mason—but no, she was not supposed to call him that anymore. Now he was “Uncle Joe” and she was Rosie—smiled encouragingly in the face of her too-transparent terror.

“You’re doing fine. Long trip, wasn’t it? And this is a lot to take in. But you’ll feel better once you get some rest.”

She didn’t want to call him a liar, but she didn’t imagine how that could be true. Her entire life had been stripped away. First had come the _coup_ , the threat against her coronation and the promise of a prison cell she’d escaped by a margin no wider than the blade of Major Mason’s sword. They had smuggled her away from her birthright in the back of a donkey cart, more criminal than Crown Princess, and she suffered in shell-shocked silence the transportation in a stinking, soot-belching barge that bore her and her American protector away from the shores of Costa Luna.

They’d made it to France, where he’d bought her a couple changes of clothing and booked their passage from Cherbourg. A flurry of telegrams had been sent and received, and after something had been decided—though Rosie wasn’t told exactly what—they spent a week crossing the ocean. She was told she must hide in her cabin, with only a few books and Major Mason for company. He’d passed the time by telling her something of the nature of the international, quasi-militaristic society that had appointed itself her rescuer and intended to keep her hidden until she could regain her throne.

Now Major Mason was bringing her home. To _his_ home, not hers. Home to a city he had vaguely described as “a lot to take in” and which was, in these first few minutes, proving him a liar by the sheer force of his understatement.

And this was only the pier.

“The Port of New York,” she said carefully, fitting her tongue around the words, painfully conscious of not sounding as she should. “Chelsea Pier.”

The crush, the noise, the impossible  _size_ of it overwhelmed her.

“Is the rest of New York this big?”

For the first time Major Mason looked at her with apprehension, as if the enormity of what he had done, bringing highly sheltered young female royalty across the ocean from her tiny, pre-industrial kingdom into one of the biggest cities in the world, had rocked the even keel of his quiet confidence. Then his expression smoothed and he patted her shoulder.

“You’ll get used to it, Rosie. You’ll see. Here—this is us.”

He steered her into one of the longer lines. A neatly-lettered placard swung overhead in invitation to RETURNING RESIDENTS. Rosie drew her square case close, travel-grimed gloves tightening at the knuckles as she squeezed the handle protectively.

She was not a returning resident.

“Yes you are,” said Uncle Joe, and for a moment she thought she had done something truly foolish, like say it out loud. Then she realized he was speaking out of understanding, possibly in response to the frightened uncertainty on her face.

“You are my niece,” he smiled down at her, reassuring, confident, the sort of smile she remembered belonging to her own father. “You’re my sister’s baby girl and we’re bringing you home. You are just an all-around ordinary American girl.”

No. She was not.

But she could pretend to be. And for the sake of her mother and her kingdom, she had to.

So Rosie stitched the tattered memory of her smile back across her face, stuck her hand in his and beamed her joy of return to a country that was supposed to be her own.

The line moved along at surprising speed, given its length. The crisply-uniformed customs officials were uninterested in detaining anybody any longer than necessary, and that included her Uncle Joe, who stepped up to the inspection table with the same self-assurance that had given Rosie so much second-hand confidence from the moment her mother first presented him.

The day had been warm, even for a Mediterranean summer, and every window in the Queen’s sitting room had been flung open in defiance of the approaching army. Queen Sofia had been composed even in the face of certain conquest, her stubborn resolve having been bred into her long before a lowborn country girl ever met and married the once-was King of Costa Luna. Her only concern had been securing the safety of her daughter, and in that purpose, she and her American guest were as one.

“This is Major Mason, _mija_. Your father spoke of him before his passing, and I have reached out to him now. I’ve asked for the Major’s assistance in securing the transfer of power. He . . .” she had faltered, searching for just the right words, “he represents people who wish to help us; people who will keep you safe.”

Now Major Mason was Uncle Joe, and he was smiling at the customs inspector like they both understood this was mere formality. A man like Joe Mason would never be detained at a port inspection point. He was too ordinary, and everybody was expected to believe it. Even knowing as she did who he was and what he could do, Rosie, watching, almost believed it too.

The questions were polite and perfunctory. Uncle Joe’s answers came with calm fluidity, so the whole thing sounded more like a couple neighbors catching up than an official interrogation.

Uncle Joe’s sister and her husband were killed in a flood, so he had travelled to Spain to assume custody of his niece. Polite interest was directed momentarily in Rosie’s direction at this revelation, and she clutched her case even tighter, hoping she looked like an American orphan raised in Spain.

Apparently. The polite interest flickered back to Uncle Joe without lingering, and Rosie felt some particularly tight part of herself slack, deep within, just a bit.

Mr. Mason’s occupation was a commercial traveler and he gave his address as 326 East 72nd Street, which meant nothing to Rosie, but she saw the official glance her way again so she smiled as if it did. Then they were invited to place their bags on the table for inspection.

Rosie stood back, grateful for the focus to be redirected to her belongings. Those, at least, she was confident would not give her away. There was nothing in the case except clothing, a small bag of toiletries and the books Uncle Joe had given her before they sailed: American stories, full of plucky young people on unlikely adventures. Rosie wasn’t sure they gave an accurate picture of the world she was entering, but they had been an escape, and she looked at the books fondly as the customs agent turned them over in his hands while putting a few questions to her directly.

“Any fruit or vegetables, Miss? Other plant products? Livestock?”

“N-no,” she stumbled over the answer even though it was true. A flutter of panic fought up into her throat. If she couldn’t even speak the truth with confidence, how could she ever hope to deceive him?

But now he was holding her passport, along with Uncle Joe’s, having already lost interest in questioning what he imagined was a pale, trembling orphan undone by the length of her journey and the enormity of her loss.

“Welcome to New York, Mr. Mason; Miss.” And then he actually smiled at her, warm and very real under the stern blue cap and the shiny silver badge affixed to it. “I hope that soon you’ll feel at home.”

They didn’t wait for him to change his mind. Uncle Joe guided her, quick and sure, through the rows of tables and out into a rain-lashed September afternoon in New York City.

“There, you see?” he smiled down at her. “Nothing to worry about.”

She wanted to believe it was true.

This was certainly the right kind of city to get lost in. Rosie couldn’t imagine anybody would find her here. The whole place was in the grip of a torrential downpour, streets thick with mud and filthy water. The crowds at the pier gave way to crowds at the taxi stand, everybody soaking wet and fighting for a dry trip home.

The way Uncle Joe fought through the crowds, pulling her in his wake, to claim one of the few cars remaining reminded her of the rescue back in Costa Luna. He bundled her and their cases into the car, pulled the door shut with a sharp clack and gave an address Rosie couldn’t help but notice was not the same one he had given the customs officer. The engine roared to life and they pulled out into the flooding streets.

Everywhere she looked there was traffic. Streetcars, buses, and the square, closed tops of automobiles all beetled through the city streets, sending up showers of dirty water in their wake. Rosie’s put out a hand, unthinking, to clutch at the door as the car took a corner and knocked her to one side. Uncle Joe immediately attracted the attention of their driver.

“Slow down,” he ordered. “We’re not in any hurry back here.”

The driver slacked the pace of the car after that, and Rosie struggled against a rush of nerves and nausea that threatened to bring up the remnants of her lunch.

“I’m fine,” she said weakly, in response to Uncle Joe’s searching gaze. “It’s only . . . new.”

“You’ll get used to it,” he said, echoing his promise back at the pier. “Not exactly a donkey’s pace, is it?”

For that, she managed a smile. Uncle Joe smiled back.

“You can take the train next time, if you want. The L runs right by our place. Normally that’s what we use to get around, but I thought it might be too much for you on your first day. Crowds, and all. And it’ll be even worse with the rain.”

Crowds on a train, obliged to follow the direction of its track, seemed a lot less frightening than hurtling through free-flying vehicles at the mercy of the skill of an unknown chauffeur . . . or so she thought, until she caught a few glimpses of the contraption itself as they drove. It was a train, as he said, but it ran on an elevated track built on iron stilts so that it passed high above the brick paved roads between the uppermost stories of tall houses and the middle stories of the tallest buildings Rosie had ever seen.

“Isn’t it something?” Uncle Joe marveled, and from somewhere deep in a muddle of exhaustion, gratitude, distant fear for her mother and mounting, nervous excitement about this crowded, loud place he had brought her to, Rosie found the will to share his awe.

“Yes. It’s . . . something.”

 _Something_ , too, was a good way to describe the city itself. From one street to the next Rosie couldn’t figure out what sort of place this was. Busy and loud, yes, but built out of many pieces, old and new, some lovely, some less so.

They drove downtown, across town. Rosie only knew because Uncle Joe said so; her sense of direction was poor to begin with, and the downpour only compounded it. They crossed wide streets, then narrow streets, heading further south, further east, until the buildings crowded in around them and the driver slowed almost a crawl, navigating throngs of wet pedestrians with begrudging care.

The cab stopped at last, rolling from a crawl to a standstill in front of a flat, dark building with no marking of any note. People pushed past, left and right, but nobody went in. Nobody came out.

Rosie’s stomach turned. She edged out onto the pavement as slowly as she could, frightened of what might lie ahead.

“This place . . . is it a prison?”

Uncle Joe did not answer, he was too busy settling the fare with the taxi driver, but a small, slender woman wearing a forgettable dark dress and an outdated riot of yellow curls clustered on the top of her head emerged from the building just in time to hear her question.

“Not prison.” Her accent was Russian, her bearing regal. “Protection.” She watched the taxi pull away, then nodded to Uncle Joe.

“Director,” he said, tugging his hat farther down on his head. The water washed off the brim in a torrent. “Some kind of weather we’re having.”

“Yes. It suits us. Nobody is curious on days like this.” The Director gestured at the people who hurried past, every one of them apparently oblivious to the international intrigue playing out under their noses. Uncle Joe grinned appreciatively.

“Right. Come on then Rosie, let’s get you outta the weather.”

Rosie did not see that she had a choice. She was ushered off the street into a narrow, dark entry. Some faint lighting was provided by gas sconces on the wall, sparking and guttering like something from twenty years ago. In the dim light the yellow-haired woman called Director turned and smiled a welcome.

“Princess Rosalinda Marie Montoya Fiore, you are now in the safe custody of the International Princess Protection Program.”

Rosie glanced at Uncle Joe. He had told her a very little on the ship, but before that . . .

“I have not _really_ heard of it,” she confessed.

“Nobody ever hears about us until we're needed.” She nodded to the man who stood solid and correct at Rosie’s shoulder. “Good work, Major.”

“Thank you, Director.” Something of the soldier had returned as Major Mason spoke; short, clipped, official. He didn’t act like rain had any effect on him, but Rosie couldn’t say the same. She shivered as she dripped all over the thick rug inside the door, then, at the Director’s guidance, trailed tiny rivers of water up three flights of dark wooden stairs.

On the fourth, top floor of the building the Director disappeared through a pair of tall, narrow doors. Joe was on the point of following her when he glanced over his shoulder at Rosie.

She tried to find a smile for him, something to say she was still glad to be alive and knew she owed him that, but it turned out she’d used her last one in the taxi. Every mile between this place and the one she had left coiled around her chest and she looked at him with something between hopelessness and fear. His concern from the pier resurfaced, flickering across his face before he chased it away with a gentle smile.

“You’ll be safe now, your highness. We’ll see to that. Trust me?”

She did. And because she did, she found the courage to follow him into the room.

The space beyond the door was broad and tall, a faded Victorian-era cavern filled with pale grey light and a surprising number of people, all of them gathered, ready . . . waiting for _her_.

The Director stood at the head of the group, and she was smiling still, as if this were all according to plan. Rain whipped the windows at both ends of the room, and coal fires in two grates did very little to allay the chill.

Rosie shivered, wet and lost, and listened to the Director’s welcome.

“Welcome, Princess Rosalinda, to the operational heart of the Princess Protection Program, a top-secret agency funded by the world's royal families. We are actively providing protection to a number of princesses, all of whom have been threatened in one way or another.”

“Threatened . . . like me?”

The Director declined to specify.

“The threat may not always be so violent or dramatic; indeed, politics rarely are these days. So many little democracies cropping up instead. But it is always of a nature which necessitates some manner of protection, and such is the nature of your case. Please,” she held out a hand, “let's take a walk.”

Rosie was led away from the shadow of Major Mason, farther into the room. This part of the space was furnished with a collection of desks, most of them stacked high with paper. Maps papered an entire wall, bristling with a neat collection of pins and charts which listed names and locations and dates that meant nothing to Rosie.

The Director saw her looking at them.

“Everything is in code. The building is more fortified than it seems, but breach is always a possibility. In the event our secrets are ever stolen, we have ensured that they will not be of any use to the thief. There, you see,” she nodded to a woman in the act of blotting a sheet of paper at her desk, “Chloe has given you a new name.”

Chloe was a trim, efficient-looking girl barely older than Rosie herself. Her hair was pinned back neatly from her face and she wore a dress as dark and forgettable as the Director’s own. Conscious of the Director’s attention, she quickly tacked the freshly-blotted note to the board and smiled at the newcomer.

“Would you like to see?”

Rosie saw, but did not understand.

“Rachel Goldstein?”

“That’s the name we gave you for the map. The initials match your false identity. We don’t actually post your new name anywhere visible, in case of breach. It’s how we keep track of all our princesses without needing to open the safe.”

“The safe?”

“Yes, the original of every file is kept—”

“Perhaps it is best not to give away all our secrets in one day, Chloe,” the Director said mildly. Chloe blushed.

“Yes of course.”

“But walk with us, please. Princess Rosalinda is about to enter stage three, and I require a consult prior to stage four.”

“Stage three? Four?” Rosie looked back and forth between the two, a now-familiar wave of confusion rolling up within her once more. “What are these?”

The Director, instead of answering immediately, gestured before her.

“Please.”

So Rosie went ahead of them, back into the hall and down one flight of stairs. The set of doors they entered there was identical to the set above, but the room was not. Instead of one cavernous space, this was a rabbit warren of stuffy small ones, garishly papered, each one staffed with people hard at work by the light of guttering gas lamps or candles.

They had to walk through one room to reach another, as there was no central hall. Many rooms had as many as three or four different doors to choose from. Rosie quickly became hopelessly lost in the tangle and she wondered if this was one of the fortifications the Director had mentioned. After being steered through the maze it was a relief to enter a long, empty space at the very back of the building. The wall was set with tall windows that let her see the world was still out there, the rain still pouring down.

There wasn’t time to linger. She was guided along through another door, into a wardrobe area beyond.

“This is stage three,” said the Director, as three girls in clean white smocks gathered around. “Transformation. These ladies will help with your hair and properly outfit your wardrobe. You must appear in every respect to be an ordinary American girl. It is their duty to make it so.”

Duty. Well, Rosie understood that. She squared her shoulders and faced them, this bright-eyed rosy-cheeked little army, ready to do their duty if she would only cooperate.

She tried. She really did.

The bath they drew was heavenly, hot enough to drive out the chill of cold rain. Her flesh pinked and plumped in the steaming tub and she marveled at the soap, a pure white cake that floated— _floated!_ —at the surface of the water.

Once she was clean, wardrobe was next. Two of the girls were definitely subordinate in this task; they were called Miriam and Antoinette, and they were sent running to and fro by the third. Together they dressed her from the skin out in modern, department store Junior styles.

Rosie bore this as best she could, but dressing and undressing at the command of another was unusual, and the clothing only made it worse. The shoes were strange, the fabric of the dresses and coats cut very loose. Even her _underwear_ felt foreign.

“You’ll get used to ‘em,” the chief girl explained, laughing, but not unkindly. Her name was Blanche, and she seemed like she would be difficult to argue with, so Rosie kept private her belief that she would never get used to any of this.

“Now you’ll want stockings.” Blanche whipped a few lengths of silk out of a discreet drawer to display them proudly. “Light as anything, aren’t they? I’ve seen some pictures out of your region, and I’m afraid you won’t be used to much of this. They kept you well covered for a Mediterranean country, didn’t they? In America you’re allowed to show a little leg. Nobody falls over at the sight of an ankle these days! And you sure got some nice legs, don’t you?”

Rosie, in the act of baring those legs for far from the first time that day, paused self-consciously. She wasn’t accustomed to comments on her appearance, especially ones made in such a familiar fashion.

Blanche, oblivious to her mannequin’s discomfort, gave a cheery whistle and her team appeared from behind a screen, laden with garments for trial.

“Here’s a swell dress, this eggplant color’s very popular just now. And your coat’s this season’s. Look at this hat, isn’t it sweet? Now we’ll just bob your hair and that’ll be all you need from us!”

But it was too much. Too fast. She had not eaten since lunch. She had gone from too cold to too hot. Without any windows she had no sense of how long she’d been in there, closeted with all three of them, drowning in a sea of silk and chiffon and stockings, with legs that everybody would see.

Blanche and Miriam and Antoinette’s smiles were too white, their cheeks too pink, their smocks too hospital-grade-clean. They pressed against her, too warm, too close. Rosie couldn’t help it.

She screamed.

Never, not even in Costa Luna, had her scream provoked such a response at such a speed. With the volume and rapidity of gunfire, a hundred doors slammed shut. Voices rose, not in panic, but in sharp, aggressive military readiness. Heels slammed against the floor and somewhere, as if in the bones of the very building itself, something went THUD.

Better fortified than it looked, indeed.

The Director had reached them by then, composed and calm.

“Princess Rosalinda? What is wrong?”

She didn’t really know how to explain it, the feeling that her hairdressers were also walls closing in on her, and she knew it would sound ridiculous if she tried. Instead she said the truest thing she could that she hoped would still make sense.

“I do not know you. Any of you. I don’t trust . . . I want Major Mason. I only trust Major Mason.”

The Director assessed the entire scene at a glance. She flicked her hand, very slightly, at Chloe, and Chloe fled in search of Major Mason.

* * *

He met her in the long, light hallway beyond the transformation room. The world outside was shrouded in night, so the light was provided by lamps set in the wall. Everything was warm and yellow, with room to breathe.

Major Mason must have been nearly as tired as Rosie, but he hid it much better. The only sign of how much time he’d spent there was the absence of his hat and jacket. He stood with arms bared to the elbows, folded comfortably across his waistcoat, and waited for her to speak. His posture and dress should have made him seem impatient; he’d clearly been pulled away from the end of this mission, maybe even from the beginning of a new, equally important one. But instead of rushed or annoyed, he just seemed familiar.

Safe.

A thread of tension, drawn to the breaking point along Rosie’s spine, relaxed.

“Please,” she said, “I don’t . . . I don’t know if I can do this.”

“It’s a lot, I know. But this is all for your own good, and the good of your kingdom.”

Her kingdom. Costa Luna. The homesickness she had not yet allowed herself to feel hit her with such sudden power, it almost hurt.

“Take me back,” she whispered. “Please. Take me back there.”

“I'm sorry. It can’t be done. General Kane has taken full control of your country and assumed command of its government.”

“Yes, I know, I _know_ , but I must go back. I have to help. To—to _do_ something.”

“You will. As soon as we find a legal way to remove him, you will go back and claim your throne. In the meantime, you have to let us protect you.”

“But what about my mother?” Her voice broke over the question. So many things she hadn’t let herself wonder until now. “Who's protecting my mother?

He was worse than gentle, now. He was _pitying_. The distance he kept between them was completely correct, effortlessly attendant to the protocol of her court and kingdom, but he might as well not have bothered at all because the way he spoke was like nobody should speak to a princess.

Nobody should have to feel sorry for a princess.

“ _You_ are protecting her. As long as you're in our protection, your mother’s safety is assured. Our contacts in the kingdom indicate that General Kane is hoping you'll contact her so he'll know where to find you.”

“What if he does?”

“Then he'll make an example of you by sending you to prison or a work farm. And Costa Luna will become part of his own personal kingdom, with its true royal family nothing but a memory.”

That was interesting. Somewhere in the middle of this speech, the tone of pity turned to . . . something tight. Almost angry. Rosie looked at him in surprise.

“Major Mason?”

He seemed surprised too, to have betrayed himself to such an extent. He cleared his throat.

“I’ve seen it happen. I swore I’d never see it twice. What it all comes down to is that if you care about your country, and the safety of your mother, nobody can know who you really are.”

She considered, not the threat of exposure, but the very real pain behind Major Mason’s brief revelation. She imagined what her own father would have done to protect himself from seeing his wife and daughter suffer such a fate.

She bowed her head.

“Very well. I am ready.”

Rosie was too well-trained to betray it was a lie, and Major Mason was too well-trained to betray that he knew.

Together they returned to the room for Stage Three.

* * *

Major Joe Mason had been back in the city almost a week, and his daughter wasn’t supposed to know it.

She wouldn’t have known, either, except that, thinking he was still away, she went to school on Friday to enroll for the coming year and was told her father had already completed her registration.

“What?” She stared at the secretary, thinking she must have heard wrong. “No, he can’t—I mean, when?”

Miss Percival smiled brightly and consulted her register.

“First thing Wednesday morning. He was the third parent in. Very prompt, your father.”

“Yeah, that’s Dad,” Carter muttered, and slouched out of the office in an even worse mood than registering for school had already put her in.

What was her dad doing in the city without coming home? Usually his missions ended the day of his arrival; he’d stop at the headquarters she wasn’t supposed to remember, he’d give his final report and he’d be home that night.

She wasn’t always awake when he got in, but he’d be waiting at the breakfast table in the morning with a cup of coffee and a welcome grin, ready to learn what she’d done in his absence.

That was how it always was, only this time . . . what was different?

She tried to shrug off the prickles of unease but before she could completely push them aside, the day got exponentially worse. Just as she left the building, she narrowly missed colliding with a trio walking in.

“Oh, sorry,” she began, then froze mid-apology.

Bonnie smiled at her, perfectly neutral. “Not at all, Carter.”

Chelsea and Brooke drew in close on either side of Bonnie, their smiles less perfect and not at all apologetic.

“Coming back this year?” Chelsea marveled. “Well that’s just so brave of you, isn’t that brave of her, Brooky?”

“Why?” Brooke said, looking even more blank than usual.

“Because of _last year_ ,” Chelsea gritted through her smile, and Brooke’s confusion cleared.

“Oh! Yes. Brave.” And she smiled just as unpleasantly.

Carter growled, low in her throat, and barged past them both to the sidewalk.

If her father came home before school started, she’d take him to task for holding out on her and then beg him to register her somewhere else—anywhere at all, as long as it wasn’t here.

Sure, he went on international missions to hostile foreign countries, but this was _high school_. One more year of Chelsea and Brooke was more than even her dad could expect her to deal with.

* * *

Rosie was conscious of posing a problem.

It was a new experience for her. A princess wasn’t usually treated as a problem to solve; at worst, she was somebody whose wishes needed to be accommodated. But it was pretty clear, as they approached the one-week anniversary of her arrival in the United States, that she was causing problems for the Princess Protection Program.

She still struggled to trust anybody but Major Mason. She knew rationally that everybody was there to help—they were the same people who had arranged for Major Mason to save her, in answer to her mother’s plea—but they hadn’t  _been_  there. They weren’t the ones who had leaped into action at the attack from within, the unanticipated second arm of the coup that rose up in their very palace.

That had been Major Mason.

Major Mason had been the one to drive back Dmitry, the head of her personal guard, who had been trusted as almost nobody else in the kingdom was trusted until he turned on them. It was Major Mason who led her on the escape route through the palace, waited for her to share parting words with her mother, never betraying the impatience he must have felt, only moving her along with devastating competence and the faintest suggestion of good humor until they reached the safety of the border and she’d been able to emerge from the back of the cart.

She knew that all of those memories were shaping her perception, and not for the best. She knew it was the reason Major Mason was still in the building instead of going to his own home. He was often called in to explain things to her, because somehow it seemed truer when he said it.

Nonsense, of course. All of them were just as trustworthy as he, but knowing it didn’t help her to really believe it, and that was the problem. Lately she could hear them worrying about the risk posed by her obvious fear and discomfort if they proceeded with the plan to put her on a train to a safe house in Iowa.

“She is never going to fool anybody there,” the Director muttered. The weekend was looming and they were no closer to a resolution. Rosie was curled up with a book in the little bedsitting room that she had occupied since they arrived, pretending she could not hear them through the flimsy plaster and lathe of the makeshift wall between her room and the office beyond. “Nobody will imagine she is from _Iowa_.”

“The hair should help,” Major Mason chuckled. “She looks like Mary Pickford or that—that Spas kid, the one that was in all the papers for a while. Doesn’t look like too many of the girls in New York these days. Even my own girl cut all hers off a year ago; said she wasn’t a kid anymore. Guess somehow that was supposed to prove it.”

It was true Rosie had drawn a line at the bobbing of her hair. They won only a few inches off the bottom and now the shining auburn weight of it was coiled neatly at the nape of her neck. She wondered if he was right; maybe the style made her look too imported to be American.

“Of course even if they could believe she is from Iowa, there is the difficulty of her reliance on you, Major. But this does happen from time to time, and we have adjusted in the past. There is really only one possible solution, I think.” The Director sighed, sounding very world-weary as she did. “I could order it, but it should really be your choice. What do _you_ think?”

“Like you say,” Major Mason agreed, “it’s really the only realistic option. No problem for us, and I’m sure Carter will be fine with it. We’ll manage.”

“The story can be the same as the cover used for your travel. A niece. It is good; convenient.”

“I’ll go back up to the school today and add her to the register.”

“At least her English is not so bad,” the Director murmured. “But it is a little too _right_. She will need to learn her slang, Major. I trust you will see to this.”

“The city will see to it,” Major Mason promised, and they both chuckled at this, but Rosie did not understand the joke.

Nothing was heard the next day, and Rosie wondered if she should inquire. But the following morning they officially advised her of the plan. She was to pack her bags with the new American items and go home with Major Mason.

Her relief was so evident, even the Director smiled at the sight.

“From now on, remember always that you are no longer princess. You must in every hour of every day be only Rosie González, an average American girl.”

Rosie nodded, determined that she would not disappoint their accommodation of her.

“What happens next?”

Now it was Major Mason—no, Uncle Joe’s turn to smile at her.

“Now we go somewhere General Kane will never think of looking for the Princess of Costa Luna.”

* * *

It wasn’t quite the godforsaken location he’d implied. He admitted it was easy enough to reach from Headquarters if they had taken the L or even just driven uptown. But they had to engage in something called evasive maneuvers, which meant several changes of taxi and a great deal of walking in between.

“Can’t be too safe,” he said as they hailed their third and semifinal taxi, at a spot very near the original point of their ship’s landing six days earlier.

But Rosie didn’t mind. This felt right. Yes, the city was impossibly large. Yes, her feet felt squished and strange in her tight new shoes, and she was still awkwardly conscious of her own underwear. But she was safe, she would continue to be safe, and as long as she was safe her mother and her kingdom would be too.

By the time they switched to their fourth cab, the taxi ride had become so familiar she could almost relax. There was the familiar jerk and zip of the vehicle, the putt-putt-putt of the motor and the blur of buildings rushing past . . .

Then, somehow, they seemed to abandon the city altogether. The buildings disappeared and green hedgerows hemmed them in, muffling the crush of sound. Rosie heard her own exhalation plainly for the first time since they had come out the door of the Program headquarters.

“Central Park,” Joe said, nodding out the window. “You can come back here to look around once you get settled in; I have a feeling this might be more your speed. Carter could bring you, if you want.”

Carter was his daughter. Rosie had asked about her back on the ship when she was first mentioned, but Uncle Joe had been evasive. Now that they were nearly in the same room as the girl, though, he seemed to relax.

“I would like that,” said Rosie. “If she is willing.”

She meant it only as a courtesy; giving space for Miss Mason to bow out if she didn’t want to squire a false cousin around the city at the expense of her own schedule. But Major Mason—no, _Uncle Joe_. Only, it was the first time he’d looked at her that particular way since they’d left Costa Luna, fierce and solemn, a soldier ready for battle, so she felt the lapse was forgivable—pulled his mouth down in a strange way, then returned his attention to the thickly-planted greenery that ran along both sides of the road.

“She’ll . . . probably be up for it.”

Rosie wasn’t sure how to take that, so she kept quiet as they left the park and their driver navigated the remaining streets to the Mason family’s home.

The house was a narrow building made of smooth brown stone. The rich color reminded Rosie of the clay soil of Costa Luna, and her heart hitched as she stepped down to the pavement, and Uncle Joe settled with the driver.

“It’s quite tall,” she said, because she felt like she must say something. Five rows of windows, one row almost hidden behind an iron railing at the pavement level, were already deepening in shadow as the sun sank below the skyline to her right.

“It’s not all ours,” said Uncle Joe, joining her in front of it. “They’re apartments.” He took a case in each hand. “It’s not much, but what’s ours is yours now too.”

Rosie followed him into a wide, clean hall. A bright, lemony smell followed them up two flights of polished wooden stairs. The clack of her heels was nominally muffled by a thin green runner marking the middle of the staircase, but she suspected the entrance of all guests was easily heard behind the doors they passed before stopping in front of one particular door on the third floor.

“Welcome to your new home,” said Uncle Joe. “Here, I’ll get that for you.”

In the room beyond he set their bags against the wall, giving her a moment to take in the space.

The ceilings were tall; the room long and narrow. A set of doors in the middle could be closed to make two rooms, but for now they stood open, letting late afternoon light wash through and paint everything gold. The open doors also gave Rosie a clear view from the living area, with its low, informal-looking furniture, into the room beyond.

It was a sort of kitchen-dining room combined, with a table and pristine white fixtures sharing the same space. A girl sat at the table with a book open in front of her, one leg tucked up under a navy blue skirt while the other swung freely. Her foot did not quite reach the floor. Unruly black hair cut in an approximation of a bob, but without any of the control exerted by regular hairdressing, fell forward over the near shoulder of her white middy blouse. The short curtain of hair hid most of her face from view until, at the sound of the door closing behind the newcomers, she shoved her chair back and leaped up in greeting.

She was through the doorway and into the room before she registered the sight of Rosie. Her smile of welcome slid sideways into confusion.

“Carter,” Joe stepped forward, and the girl’s smile returned, though not, Rosie felt, as widely as before. Carter Mason launched herself at her father, wrapping both arms around his neck and letting him pull her into a hug that lifted her right off the floor.

“Hey Dad,” she said, sounding a little pinched for air around the middle. “Glad you’re back.”

“Me, too.” He gave her another squeeze before setting her back on the ground and looking her over from head to toe.

“Well you didn’t grow since I left. What _did_ you do?”

Carter shrugged. Most of her attention was on Rosie.

“Anything to report?” Joe prodded. “Anything at all.”

“Not much.” Carter was still looking past her father to the girl he’d brought home. “Rudolph Valentino died, did you hear? At least five girls from my school went into the hospital for nerves. Oh and the Hahns are moving out. The apartment was listed in the papers last week. I think the law finally caught up to ‘em.” By the end of this speech Carter was staring openly. Rosie, warming under the stare, looked down and away. “Now are you gonna tell me what’s up with . . .  _this_?”

“This,” Joe put a friendly hand out to draw Rosie into their reunion, “is your cousin.”

Carter gave Joe a look that said she wasn’t buying it.

“I don’t have a cousin.”

“Sure you do.” This came with a warning note, an unspoken instruction that even Rosie couldn’t miss. “She’s right here.”

Joe steered Rosie around to stand in front of him. His hands rested bracingly on her shoulders, and she tried to find some strength in his confidence; tried to take some of it for her own. “Rosie González, most recently of Spain. Your Aunt Harriet’s girl.”

Carter’s face suggested she had a few rude words to use in her description of Aunt Harriet. But she only said “and is Aunt Harriet supposed to be your sister, or Mom’s?”

It didn’t _sound_ rude. It sounded like a logical point of clarification. But Rosie felt the tension in Joe’s hands before he dropped them from her shoulders and stepped back.

“Mine.”

“Sure. Okay, then.”

“Come on, Carter,” Joe said quietly. “I need you to work with me here.”

Carter gave Rosie another once-over. Rosie fought the urge to run back to the street and find her way back to the pier, onto the ship, and home to whatever fate awaited her.

“ _Fine_.” Carter whirled on her heel and started for the door set in the farthest corner of the living room, pausing only on the threshold to look back at her uninvited guest. “Hey, Cousin Rosie? You coming, or what?”

Rosie looked anxiously at Uncle Joe, who only smiled like this was all going much better than he had hoped. So Rosie grabbed her case and followed Carter through the door to the narrow chamber on the other side.

“This is my room,” said Carter. It felt like less an introduction than a warning.

Carter’s room was small, rectangular like the living area, but much more narrowly so. The existing light was supplied by a tall, thin window overlooking the street, their privacy secured by a plain white curtain.

“It is smaller than I am used to,” Rosie admitted, without thinking. When she saw the glare Carter delivered, she wished she could take the words back. “But,” she amended quickly, “I’m sure it will feel much bigger in no time.”

Carter grimaced. “I hope you don’t have sharp toenails.”

The reason for that was plain enough: there was only one bed, just big enough for two smallish people, assuming they didn’t mind close quarters. The only other furniture was a chest of drawers and a plain wooden chair, overladen with books and bits of clothing matched to every possible state of dress.

“You can have the bottom drawer,” Carter said, hauling it out of the dresser to dump its contents onto the bed. “And the two hooks on the right.”

Rosie followed the jerk of Carter’s thumb to see a row of five hooks, also hung with various objects that did not all seem to belong on hooks, set in the wall by the door. She moved cautiously, half-afraid Carter might change her mind, to clear those two hooks of the items that hung from them—a kind of dressing gown, which seemed all right, and a stack of books bound by a strap, which did not.

“Your . . . your books?” she said, but made it a question. Carter waved her hand impatiently.

“Just dump ‘em on the bed. I’ll need them for tomorrow anyway. You should get some too, I guess. You’ll be coming with me.”

Rosie had set her case on the bed and paused in the act of opening it. “Why? Where are we going?”

“School.” Carter was shoving the things from the bottom drawer—some rocks, it looked like, and a small box and stockings that did not appear to match—into whatever other drawers could hold them. “You’re sixteen. You go to school. Or,” she amended, banging the middle drawer shut, “you could work in a factory and take evening classes. Or go part time on a continuance. Or,” she swept some clutter into a drawer at the top of her dresser, “you gatecrash a sorority dance and convince a dumb millionaire to marry you so that you never have to work again. But _you_ ,” she shoved the last drawer closed with an air of finality, “will be going to school. With me. Because apparently my dad can’t help bringing his work home with him.”

With every word Rosie felt herself shrinking, pulling her elbows against her ribs, tucking her chin to her chest, stifled by her own desire to cause as little disruption in Carter’s life as she possibly could. Carter finished loudly, angrily rearranging her belongings, then stomped back out to the living room.

The walls were not so thick that they shut out the sound of everything she and her father said to each other. Rosie made a very sincere effort not to hear any of it, partly out of manners and partly because she didn’t have to hear it to know she didn’t want to, but bits still drifted through.

“—here a whole week, why didn’t you come _home_?”

“. . . frightened, it’s difficult . . .”

“. . . get worried when I don’t know where . . .”

“. . . different. I was the only one she’d trust . . .”

“You should have _warned_ me!”

Rosie flinched, burning with the embarrassment of being somebody who required a warning. Most of Joe’s response was lost.

“ . . . just give it a chance, Carter. It won’t be . . .”

“ . . . she’s a _princess_. They're all stuck-up, snobby little . . .”

In a desperate attempt not to hear the rest, Rosie curled up on the bed and covered her head with the pillow. She couldn’t cry. She wanted to cry, but no tears had come since she left Costa Luna, and they did not make an appearance now.

Maybe it was just as well. If she started to cry now, she was pretty sure there was no way she would ever stop.

* * *

Rosie did not have sharp toenails. She didn’t even have cold feet, but Carter didn’t find either of those discoveries much of a relief. After arguing with her dad, a late supper and lights out, she lay flat on her back and stared at the ceiling as some foreign princess who was definitely _not_ her cousin slept beside her.

What the hell had her dad been thinking?

Sure, Rosie could maybe blend in for a while. She wasn’t American, and anybody would figure that out after talking to her for a few minutes, but that wasn’t the problem. It was New York, after all; at least half the girls in her school hadn’t been born there. Being from somewhere else, by itself, wasn’t weird. But being royalty was. And there was something about Rosie that . . . well. She wasn’t a regular girl. You could practically smell it on her.

Carter hadn’t meant to turn her head and verify this suspicion, but somehow it seemed the natural thing to do: look over and bury her nose in the soft waves of auburn hair that spilled across Rosie’s pillow and onto her own.

Okay, Rosie smelled like Ivory soap, just like thousands of other girls in the city. So, not that weird. But there must have been something more to it than that, because the most ordinary American beauty treatment should not have made Carter’s stomach flutter the way it did.

She slept fitfully and woke grumpy to find Rosie had already vacated the bed. Her nightgown hung neatly from one of her two appointed hooks. The self-conscious tidiness only further stoked Carter’s resentment. She stomped out of her room toward the little bathroom tucked between her bedroom and her dad’s, only to discover Rosie was already occupying it.

“Better get a move on,” Dad called. He was pouring what Carter knew would be at least his third cup of coffee. Sunday’s paper, a day late, was open to the crossword in front of him. He had filled in six words, which was the most he ever did on Sunday. It was all so comfortable, so familiar, that Carter was on the verge of smiling when his next words killed the mood.

“Don’t want to be late for Rosie’s first day.”

Carter knew the thing she did with her mouth was not a smile, but she hoped he’d think it passed for one.

“Right. Rosie’s big day.”

She returned to the bedroom and shrugged into the first school dress she could find. Green, still fit from last year . . . clean, but that was about it. She could hear Chelsea’s comments even now. The least Rosie could do was hurry up so Carter could wash her face.

Rosie must have sensed the impatience even from a room away; just as Carter stepped back into the living room, she emerged from the bathroom in a dusty rose dress with a dropped waist and neat box pleats all around the skirt. Her ankles were . . .

Carter flinched, and jerked her gaze up to Rosie’s face. She was _glowing_ , like some walking advertisement for a beauty treatment. Her face was no less distracting than her ankles. If anything, it was worse.

“About time,” Carter said, and barged past into the bathroom. She dragged a brush through her hair before trying to do something that would hold one side of it back. She knew it needed a proper set, but she’d never got that far after cutting it all off.

After scrubbing her face and knowing full well that she did not look like an ad for any kind of soap, unless it was maybe the “before she knew better what product best to use!” cautionary image at the top of the page, Carter went back to the kitchen to grab her own cup of coffee and another apple.

Rosie hovered uncertainly, pristine in pink.

“Don’t be shy, Rosie,” Dad looked up from his fourth cup. “Take whatever looks good.”

Rosie didn’t appear to be in any hurry to join in, but Carter’s attention was entirely on her food and her father. The Sunday crossword had disappeared and he had two sales ledgers out, which meant he was planning a round upstate to maintain his cover as a travelling salesman. He wouldn’t likely be back before dinner, if then.

Carter’s coffee didn’t sit too well once it went down.

“You’re leaving again?” she blurted, before she could reconsider saying it in front of the girl she’d only met last night. “Dad—”

“Not for long this time. Short trip. Just need to get some inventory shifted before anybody starts asking questions. I should be back before dinner, all right?”

Carter nodded.

“Good. Now, you two take your lunch money and get a move on,” he tipped his head toward the clock above the sink. “Or you’ll have to take the next train.”

“Right. Come on, Rosie,” Carter grabbed a couple coins off the drain board and her books from the end of the table, “I hope you know how to run.”

“Yes of course, but why—” Rosie began, then broke off as she had to bolt after Carter, who was already out the door.

* * *

Rosie ran down every flight of stairs, determined to prove she could keep up. Carter didn’t stop to check that she was close until they reached street level, and even then she only jerked her head westward, in the direction of the L station. Rosie followed.

The rain of the past few days had given way to sunshine. Rosie was perspiring as she followed Carter to the heavy flight of stairs. She was anxious not to hang back, but the great height of it and the rumble of the approaching train made her hesitate.

Carter, as if sensing Rosie’s uncertainty without looking back, yelled “Come ON!” and Rosie didn’t see that she had any choice but to follow.

The platform above 72nd Street felt impossibly tall and open. Rosie very deliberately did not look over the edge. She had ridden in a train before, but that had run along the ground. This felt unnatural.

Carter, relentless, dragged Rosie past other morning commuters to the edge of the platform.

“The doors might not be right here when it stops,” she warned, “so you’ve got to be ready to go sideways. Hard. Think you can push somebody?”

Rosie really didn’t know, but she nodded anyway.

“I can push.”

Carter squinted doubtfully, but did not challenge the claim.

“Right. Get ready. Here it comes.”

The Second Avenue elevated was not the snorting, belching beast Rosie had feared, but it did come roaring up with a fearsome clatter all the same. She stood with elbows out in readiness to deliver the necessary push, and tried to look as though the noise were an ordinary thing.

Carter didn’t reassure her, but she did seem to know Rosie was struggling to look normal. She put her mouth close to Rosie’s ear and reminded her, “They have trains in Spain. Try not to look like it’s going to bite you.”

Rosie tried. She really did. But when the thing did a long, slow squeal to a halt and the doors ended up a full six feet to her left, and the crowd _pushed_ like everybody was going to die without the option of entry . . . she froze. It was Carter’s hand on her hip shoving her in the right direction, Carter’s shout of “come _on_ , or we’ll have to _walk_ it” and Carter’s urgency that all worked together to move her, jolting her to the side so her elbow split the needed path and cleared their way onto the train.

Carter did not speak once they were on board. Rosie was grateful; she didn’t think she could have borne a scolding. Instead she settled onto the very edge of the seat Carter pushed her into, and rode to the next stop in silence.

Getting off was much easier than boarding. The people waiting on the platform let them leave first and Carter led the way down the steps to the street level, steering them back up the street in the same direction they’d just come from. She did not talk, so Rosie focused on just following and trying not to stare.

The buildings here were not as tall as some she had seen, but they were densely packed and the shops were already doing brisk business. Carter moved with purpose, crossing the street to the southeast corner at the next block and neatly dodging an absent-minded lady who was wheeling a brand new baby carriage out of a shop. Rosie did not quite dodge in time and got her shins banged for her troubles.

“I am very sorry,” she began, addressing the driver of the carriage, but Carter popped back, grabbed her elbow and hauled her along.

“What are you doing?”

“I ran into her.”

“No, she ran into _you_. Why would you apologize for that?”

“I was moving very fast; if I had been more careful, perhaps she could have avoided me.”

“Or maybe she didn’t want to. Look, you can’t go around making room for everybody you see here. They’re not going to do the same for you, and if you aren’t careful you’ll get shoved into traffic or something. Maybe look for some of that old feudal spirit, and start pushing back, okay? You’ll fit in better if you do.”

Rosie was still wondering where exactly she could dredge up her old feudal spirit when Carter indicated the building rising up before them, tall and square, a whole block wide, with girls flowing into it like ants to a hill.

“We’re here.”

Rosie, still bereft of feudal spirit, joined the anthill procession. Girls all around her were laughing, smiling, chummy with each other in a way that looked a lot like Rosie had imagined it when she read her American books on the way over. They were school friends, rejoicing in each other’s company after a long summer, linking arms at the elbow as they strolled into the building.

Rosie looked speculatively at Carter.

“Should we—“

“Absolutely not.”

But Carter did grab Rosie’s elbow when it became clear she couldn’t push her way properly through the crowd. She steered her all the way to something called homeroom that turned out not to be a very long class at all.

Homeroom was followed by French class. When they arrived Carter found a desk in the back but seemed unconcerned about Rosie, so Rosie, deciding this was a good time to find her adventuresome American spirit, if not her ancient feudal one, looked for an empty spot.

One desk was vacant, but its tabletop was occupied. A girl in a navy blue dress trimmed with red was perched on the desktop with her back to Rosie. She had a curly cap of golden brown curls shaped to her head in elegant, marcelled waves, and she didn’t seem very settled in, chatting as she was with two other girls, so Rosie tapped her hopefully on the shoulder.

“Excuse me. May I have this seat?”

“I’m not sure Dr. Lucey would approve my giving away school property,” the girl said archly. Then she turned, and looked Rosie full in the face. She faltered. Her prim, brittle humor relaxed into something softer.

“Perhaps he would understand if I made an exception.” She dropped off the desk and watched, considering, as Rosie smiled her thanks and slid into the seat.

Finally settled, she looked around cautiously only to discover Carter was watching her with an entirely new expression on her face.

Rosie squirmed, uncomfortable, and looked forward again.

* * *

The lunch meal must have followed a set program, but Rosie couldn’t figure out what it was. There was a lunchroom. In the room there was enough food for everyone, but not enough chairs, which didn’t make sense. She also observed that even though there was enough food, some girls had brought lunch from home, which they also ate in the lunchroom . . . if they were lucky enough to find a chair.

Rosie did not have lunch. She had lunch money. Her portion of the funds Carter had grabbed at breakfast was twenty-five cents, so she navigated the lunchers both sitting and standing to approach the buffet.

“Hey,” one of the standing girls whipped around and scowled fearsomely, “who d’you think you are? There’s a line here.”

“Oh,” Rosie jerked back, apologetic, “I did not know.”

“Never mind,” a new voice cut in. The pretty girl with the deep blue eyes and marcelled curls from French class appeared at Rosie’s elbow, all smiles. “You can come up with me, Rosie.”

“Really?”

“Of course,” she laughed, “I don’t mind.”

“Bonnie!” A second girl moved through the crowd with relatively little difficulty. All the other girls seemed eager to avoid her, so the crowd parted enough to allow her access. She was tall and dark, her features sharply defined, and at the moment they were cast down in a disapproving pout. “Bonnie, what are you doing?” She gave Rosie a hard look. “I thought you said we’d all eat together.”

“We will, Chelsea. Tell you what: you and Brooklyn go find a spot. Tell whoever’s in it that it’s for us, so they’ll move. I won’t be a moment.”

Having effectively dismissed her petitioner, Bonnie slipped her hand through Rosie’s elbow the way so many girls seemed to do here, and guided her up to the buffet. “I’m Bonnie, by the way. Sorry about Chelsea, she and Brooke can be a little _clingy_. You’re Carter’s cousin, isn’t that right?”

“Yes,” Rosie produced the lie with grim resolve. “Yes, I am Rosie, Carter’s cousin. From Spain. But also, originally, from America.”

“And that’s the main thing, isn’t it?” Bonnie smiled and patted Rosie’s hand. “Well, Rosie, Carter’s cousin from Spain but originally America, nice to meet you. Here,” she gestured grandly at the waiting dishes and the girls who stood behind them, waiting to assist as needed. “Enjoy your meal, and I will . . . well I’ll see you around, won’t I?”

And she gave Rosie a smile that was difficult to understand, but Rosie supposed maybe it was just an American mannerism she needed to get used to, and smiled back.

Rosie carefully thanked the girl who served her, and, on detecting an accent that made her fiercely homesick, made a point of doing so in Spanish. The girl looked pleased, if a little surprised, and Rosie let that buoy her over to a single seat in a corner so dark, it seemed to have escaped the notice of the other people standing. Or maybe they just didn’t care to dine in shadow.

Settled mostly in shadow, Rosie squinted doubtfully at the collection of split pea soup, salmon salad and twin squares of bread held together with a paste of something brownish and something purplish.

Delicately, she raised her fork and knife and attempted to cut it into smaller pieces. The thing was yielding, if reluctantly, when a tone of disbelief cut through her efforts to cut through the food.

“What are you doing?”

Rosie looked up to find Carter staring down in something almost like amusement.

“I am eating this. Food.”

“Not like that, you’re not. Ugh, give it here.” Carter leaned over the table, grabbed the knife and cut the sandwich neatly down the center. “It’s peanut butter and jelly, not a roast turkey. Pick it up. Take a bite.”

Rosie obeyed. Then she looked at Carter in pleased surprise.

“Oh! It’s like confectionary.”

“Yeah I don’t know about that,” Carter said doubtfully, watching Rosie go back for another bite, then another. “It’s just a sandwich. Do they not have sandwiches where you’re from?”

“Of course, but they are rarely served to me in this size.” Rosie marveled anew at the thing she was eating. “This is very large. Tea sandwiches are much smaller, and because we don’t entertain very often, we don’t usually have occasion for high tea.”

“Right, high tea, yeah,” Carter wrinkled her nose. “We’re fresh outta that here too. Maybe at the Waldorf.”

Rosie finished her sandwich without asking what the Waldorf was. The bell rang, signaling the end of the lunch period, and Carter looked down at her like one of them had accomplished something tiring.

“Okay,” she said, “stenography.”

Carter walked with her to class, kind of, but Rosie had to hurry to keep up. The course was held on the top floor of the western annex and overlooked the elevated track. Carter chose a typewriter directly beside the window. Rosie, who did not particularly want the sound of the train in her head any more than it had already been today, sat at a table on the opposite side of the room.

The chair beside her was filled by Chelsea, Bonnie’s possessive friend. She gave a very sharp-edged smile as she lifted the cover off her typewriter.

“So, Carter’s Cousin Rosie. You’re in stenography. What other classes are you taking?”

Rosie tried to remember the schedule of highly utilitarian courses she had accepted in homeroom. “English, I think, and American Civics, and . . . Work Experience?”

“Oh! I have work experience too,” Chelsea seemed genuinely interested in this development. “After the lecture portion we start at Macy’s, did you know? That isn’t the reason most of us care about the course, but it’s the reason it exists. Dr. Lucey has some kind of connection there. He says that retail experience is actually one of the best career paths a girl can choose . . . if she wants a career, that is.” And here Chelsea gave Rosie a sharp wink. Rosie blinked.

“I suppose many ordinary American girls wish to have a career?” she hazarded. It didn’t sound quite right, but Ruth Fielding did have a very exotic occupation making moving pictures, and Rosie had read her story fully three times now, so maybe that was the way of things.

“Oh, you know,” Chelsea dragged her fingertip thoughtfully down the side of her machine, ignoring the template she was meant to follow. “I guess it’s all right for girls who’ve got lots of brains and no face to fall back on. But I think most of us really only care to work for a few years before we settle down with a nice boy. Though that isn’t for everyone of course. Wouldn’t you agree?”

The way she was looking at Rosie was very odd. Rosie thought it was probably odd even for an American. She shifted under the stare, hot and uncomfortable.

“Um.” She fiddled with the machine, wishing she knew if she would seem too strange for not knowing how to feed the paper into it. Could she ask? Would that give her away? She looked around desperately for her cousin.

“Carter; is she . . ?”

“Oh don’t worry,” Chelsea said, now low and confiding, “we know all about her.”

Rosie did not find the promise of anybody knowing “all about anything” less worrisome at all. She jerked around to stare at Chelsea.

“Know all about . . . about . . .”

“Carter.” Chelsea’s eyes bored into Rosie’s. “It was _Bonnie_ , you know, who she . . . well.” And she put her fingertip to her bottom lip, as if vowing secrecy.

All around them the clatter of the typewriters was starting up, thundering like the wheels of the L on its high-rising track. The echo clamored in Rosie’s head. She had no idea what was going on, no notion of how to get away . . .

“Hi Chelsea.” Rosie had not heard Carter approach over the din of the machines. All of a sudden she was _there_ , standing beside her, one hand on the back of Rosie’s chair as she stared down the girl with the too-sharp, too-secret smile. “What do you think you’re doing?”

Chelsea’s smile sweetened, but Rosie did not like the look of it any better.

“Oh, your cousin and I were just chatting about _life_.” Chelsea made a show of languidly rolling her clean sheet down into the teeth of the typewriter. “She seems real sweet.”

“Yeah,” Carter’s hand did not leave the back of Rosie’s chair. Her gaze did not drop from Chelsea’s studied air of innocence. “Sweet’s the word for it, all right.”

She looked down at Rosie, and for the first time since they met Rosie saw something almost vulnerable in Carter’s face. Suddenly she felt as if she should be the one asking Carter if everything was all right. Before she could get the chance, Carter had grabbed Rosie’s copy work off the desk and jerked her hand, tugging her back toward the window.

“Come on. Sit with me. I’ll help you out.”

* * *

Typing, it turned out, was actually not that difficult and even almost fun. Rosie’s fingers were pleasantly numb by the time their course was through. She followed Carter to their next class, then the next, then the last, where she learned more of what Chelsea had started to explain.

The whole course was designed to give the students in their final year a taste of the occupations that could await them, if they so chose. The principal’s pet project was the counter work at Macy’s, but they would also have a chance to work in an office and take a screen test.

“That one’s mostly just for fun,” Carter cautioned, when Rosie asked what it meant. “Not like we can all be in the pictures. But it’s the reason half of them signed up at all. You go to the Fox studio and they make a little photoplay of us. There’s a story and we get costumes and act it out. Just like you see at the picture palaces. Then they pick one girl and she gets a little part in a real film. I don’t think anybody ever actually got a job out of that yet but it’s kind of a party. Still have to write your reflection paper on it, though.”

A lot of those words were only, Rosie felt, technically English.

“Photoplay?” she echoed. “Picture . . . oh! You mean like in the Ruth Fielding stories? All of that is real?”

Carter flinched, and Rosie shrank back at the discovery she had again reminded Carter of her own from-elsewhereness. But Carter recovered faster this time.

“Yeah it’s all real. You’ll see. I’ll take you to the movies sometime and you can see for yourself.”

That seemed to be all there was to discuss on the subject. Class ended, school was over, and they walked south to catch their train north in a perfect reverse of their route earlier that day.

The train home was much less crowded in the afternoon and Rosie found it less frightening. She even risked a look out the window at the buildings they were rushing past. At their stop she followed Carter onto the platform with something almost like confidence, though that evaporated when they reached the apartment.

“So?” Uncle Joe was waiting for them, smiling, expectant. “How was your first day?”

Carter shook her head, bitterly resigned. “She can’t do it, Dad. I mean she tried, but she _cannot_ be normal. It’s the French and the Spanish and the being scared of everything and not knowing what peanut butter or a typewriter are and just . . . all of it.”

Joe blinked at this font of information.

“She didn’t know what peanut—”

“No!” Carter flopped back on the couch. She avoided looking in Rosie’s direction. “And she’s so . . .”

“So what?”

Carter shook her head.

“Never mind. It doesn’t matter. She stands out, is the point, and all the more because she’s there with me.”

Rosie still wasn’t sure what Carter meant by that, but Joe seemed to have some kind of idea. He gave Rosie a small, tight smile.

“Hey, how about you make yourself comfortable here for a little while. Carter and I are going to take a walk.”

* * *

Carter had lost count of the number of walks she had her father had taken. First when she was small, her hand clutched in his, struggling to put short chubby legs through paces grueling enough that she could not be called a hindrance. Dad had never threatened to leave her behind if she couldn’t keep up, but somehow it had been there, an unspoken possibility in the back of her mind. She worried it could happen.

Only he hadn’t been the one she had to worry about after all.

Now their steps were even and well matched, and they had grown into two people who did their best thinking when they walked together. Today she let the silence stretch even longer than usual, until the muscles in her calves started to pinch, and she couldn’t hold it in anymore.

“How much longer is she going to be here?” she asked at last. They had walked a long row of blocks along the East River, and her chest had finally cleared enough to get that off it. Joe dragged his fingers through what was left of his hair.

“We need to keep her here ‘til it’s safe for her to go home. It could take a while. Things back there are still . . . complicated.”

Carter scuffed her toe on an uneven section of sidewalk.

“Doesn’t she have an army or something? People who can protect her there? Take her in?”

“No.”

The flat finality of it struck Carter’s conscience more brutally than she’d expected.

“Fine. So, she’ll stay with us. And I will keep introducing her as my cousin and people will keep wondering why my sixteen-year-old cousin is scared of trains.”

“I’m sure she’s not _actually_ —“

“Oh Dad,” Carter sighed. “Yeah. She is.”

“Look, her country is small. I can’t tell you a lot, you know that. For her protection, for yours . . .” Now it was his turn to look uncomfortable. Carter pretended not to notice the tension that sat across his shoulders.

“Her country doesn’t have a lot in the way of modern anything. Just have her tell people the part of Spain she comes from is remote, all right? Mountains and farms and not much else. It will explain a lot of her difficulty. How’s that?”

It was nowhere close to enough, but it would have to do. Carter knew her father well enough to know that. She nodded, sighed, and let him tug her head onto his shoulder for a bumpy, awkward side-hug as they stopped at the south corner of the block, crossed the street and started for home.

“You and me, pal,” he said quietly. “I meant it then, and I mean it now.”

She nodded.

“I know, Dad.” She knocked her knuckles against his fist, quick and clumsy, sincere. “You’n me.”

* * *

When they got back to the apartment, the hallway was sweet and thick with the smell of everyone’s supper. That was not unusual. What was strange was the smell of cooking seemed to come from their door, too.

“What’s all this?” Joe stopped in the doorway, and Carter peeked around his ribcage to see their little gate leg kitchen table was laid with a square yellow cloth and set almost prettily with china that hadn’t been aired in over a year.

Rosie stood beside her handiwork, wearing an apron over her school dress. The apron also hadn’t been aired in over a year, and Carter’s spine did unpleasant pinchy things at the memory.

“You have both been very kind to me,” Rosie said, “and made room for me in your home and your lives. I wanted to say thank you.”

“Where did you get all this?” Joe gestured helplessly at the oven and stovetop, bubbling with pots of savory-smelling meat and vegetables.

“The meat was already cooked,” Rosie admitted. “It only required warming. And vegetables do not take long to cook . . . most of the ingredients were a gift from your departing neighbors, the Hahns. They said,” Rosie scrunched up her face, trying to relay the exact quote, “they know you were not the ones who squealed.”

Joe and Carter traded glances halfway between alarmed and amused.

“Told you they were in it,” Carter couldn’t help her tiny rush of triumph. “And you said I was imagining things. Big special agent you are.”

“Hey, I watch for government insurrections, not bootleggers with mob ties,” Joe protested. “They never bothered us. And that,” he drew forward, admiring the chops Rosie was drawing from the tiny oven, “looks like a nice cut of meat. So long as they don’t plot against any nearby Royal families, all’s forgiven from where I’m standing.”

“Please,” Rosie smiled warmly, gesturing at the seats, “come and eat.”

Joe settled in with a will to obey, but Carter still hovered. She watched Rosie smooth the creases in the apron, as if trying to wipe away the months it had spent in the drawer.

Rosie didn’t know. She had no way of knowing, and Carter knew that, but somehow just knowing it didn’t make her feel any better. Before she could stop herself the words spilled out, sharp and hurtful.

“It must be nice for you to play peasant for a day. You probably don’t get the chance much, surrounded by all your servants and whatnot.”

“Carter.” Her father’s voice was heavy with warning. She ignored it.

“Glad you have a chance to slum it here with us, is all,” Carter shrugged. Her arms were crossed over her chest, braced for whatever retort Rosie fired back. But that was the worst part. Rosie didn’t fire back. She just stood a little taller, as if bracing herself against a fusillade of her own.

“Actually,” she said, “my mother was not highly born. She taught me how to cook, and I can make several dishes that are native to Costa Luna. My father said it was good for Costa Luna to have a princess who understood her connection to the people.”

“Then why don’t you go back to the people who are so connected to you,” Carter ground out, “and stop digging around in other peoples’ lives where you don’t belong?”

“Carter!” her father was on his feet now, thunderously angry. “There is _no_ call—”

Carter did not bother to wait for the rest of the lecture. She ran from the room into her own and slammed the door so hard it added another threadline crack in the plaster overhead. She curled up on the bed, arms wrapped around her knees, and buried her head under the pillow in an effort to hide from the memory of the last time she’d seen that apron worn.

It didn’t work. Not until Rosie’s featherweight knock sounded on the door, followed, after a long pause, by the princess herself.

She had taken off the apron.

Carter, still curled up, stared.

“I think,” Rosie said quietly, “that you need to hear something.”

Carter shrugged. The effect was kind of ruined by the way she laid on the bed, but Rosie didn’t seem to notice. She moved into the room with slow, small steps, as if the act of measuring these out gave her some kind of control over herself.

As if she needed something to focus on other than what she was about to say.

“I am Rosalinda Marie Montoya Fiore, and I am a Royal Princess.”

Carter’s lip curled almost of its own accord. Rosie continued, undaunted.

“I am heir to the throne of Costa Luna.”

“And where’s that, second star to the right and straight on ‘til morning?”

“It is an island nation of very little importance to larger powers. We are . . . your father called it pre-industrial. This means we do not have most of your technologies, or armies, or anything that would make us attractive to anything but the most petty of tyrants and malevolent of local powers. It is one of these which invaded us. It is because of _him_ that your father was appointed my protector.”

“No,” Carter corrected her, surging up in bed, “it’s because of his _job_. Yes, he saved your life, because that’s what he does. You see him as some kind of knight in shining armor or something stupid like that, the only person who can keep you safe, but really he’s just a regular guy who works for a kind of secret army and they go around rescuing princesses.”

Okay when she put it like that it made her dad sound pretty exciting. But even so.

“Dad takes his orders from the Program and they told him to save you. It’s what he does.”

“He saved me,” Rosie agreed. Her voice was very soft now. “He was very brave, and risked his life to help me escape. But we left my mother behind.”

Oh.

Carter felt an inconvenient tug of pity.

“Rosie, you don’t—”

“General Magnus Kane, the warlord who invaded my kingdom, now holds her as a hostage. She stayed out of a sense of duty; her connection to the people that you mocked. Her sense of belonging. She sought to inspire them to keep hope of my return, but now she is the very means by which he can force it.”

“Rosie, you can’t possibly—”

“No. I cannot go back. Not while doing so would endanger my homeland. It was my mother’s wish that I be safe, and I will do whatever I must to obey her. I will follow your father’s orders, I will listen to your advice on how to be ordinary. I will try to blend in. I will simply be your cousin.”

Rosie had walked forward the whole time she spoke. Now she was within an arm’s reach of Carter. Her eyes swam with unshed tears, bright and fierce and fearful. Her chest heaved with the force of her emotion, but those were the only outward signs of everything she had lived through.

Carter swallowed.

“Rosie, look, it . . . I’m sorry. The stuff out there, I didn’t really mean . . .”

“Yes.” Rosie sat on the edge of the bed. “Yes, you meant it. I do not fault your honesty, Carter. I hoped only to reciprocate.”

“Yeah, well,” Carter shrugged, “mission accomplished.”

Rosie smiled uncertainly.

“So, please. If I am to be ordinary, I wish to do what ordinary American girls would do. I hope you are willing to help me in this.”

A tiny smile curled the edge of Carter’s mouth.

“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, I think we can arrange that.”

* * *

That Saturday, Carter took her on the subway. For just ten cents Rosie had the dubious privilege of riding a packed car all the way south of Brooklyn, to a place where Carter assured her thousands of ordinary Americans spent their Saturdays.

“Coney Island,” Carter said grandly, waving around at a sea of cheap straw boaters and department store bargain rack cloche hats. “You’re gonna love it or you’re gonna hate it. By the end of the day you might even love to hate it, but we won’t know which it is until we try.”

Rosie looked and looked and looked, until everything she looked at seemed to blend in with everything else she saw. The smell of popcorn and fried food and salt water and human sweat was everywhere she turned. Carter seemed to find the expression on her face amusing; at least, she grabbed her by the hand, laughed, and hauled her along to the first ride of the day.

“Is it safe?” Rosie hovered outside the strange metal car that Carter was already climbing into.

“Safe enough! Come on, hurry up.”

Rosie tucked herself cautiously in beside her guide. She took hold of the wheel at the middle, and they were off.

Great waves of flat sheet steel roiled and boiled around them. They were tossed up and down like cats in a blanket, and Rosie had sudden, aggressive reason to regret everything she’d eaten since supper the night before.

“Isn’t it fantastic?” Carter exulted. She guided their little car forward with adventurous aggression and Rosie, stealing a quick look at Carter’s face, realized she really meant it. Her eyes were shining, her cheeks flushed and her head was thrown back as they rode the strange mechanical waves. Somehow, Carter found this fun.

The discovery was enough to convince Rosie to give it a chance. Not that she had much choice—she was fairly sure they would not have stopped the ride even at her command—but she stopped counting the seconds she had been prisoner on it, and started imagining they were captains of their own strange little vessel, maneuvering it over stormy seas to some elusive, promised coastline. Men darting between the moving cups helped keep them from terrible collision; they were bumped only a few times, and after the first time Rosie didn’t even find it scary.

By the time the ride was done, she was laughing too.

“There, you see?” Carter gave her a gentle poke in the midsection as they left the area. “Not so bad. Here, we’ll do the steeplechase next.”

Rosie, who did know how to ride, was surprised to discover the horses were not real. They were wooden carvings, much like you’d find on a carousel, and they dove up and down a track of hills and curves in a manner that she did not even have to ask about: she was sure it was horrifically unsafe.

But Carter, as alive and merry as Rosie had ever seen her, was dragging her into the lineup and somehow Rosie didn’t have the heart to balk. Instead she climbed up behind Carter on some woodcutter’s alarming approximation of a horse and wrapped her arms tight around the other girl’s waist.

Carter’s breath was coming fast. Rosie felt the flex and pull of her muscles through the thin cotton sleeves of her blouse. Carter seemed to tense for a moment at the contact, and Rosie braced to be told to buck up or get her own mount, but Carter did not push her away. Instead she twisted her head around a bit to catch Rosie’s eye, and said only “you okay?”

Rosie nodded.

“Yes. I think . . .”

But then the operator pulled the stick and they were off, all six of them hurtling down the first hill, over a short bump, then down a second hill and _then_ —the big drop. Rosie had no more breath to say what she thought. She buried her face in the back of Carter’s neck, risking only a tiny peek as they swooped up at the bottom of the long hill.

To their right and left ran other horses, some ridden singly, and others in pairs. Their own horse was running very near the front of the pack, so it was not until they reached the finish line that Rosie realized they knew one of the other riders.

Chelsea Barnes, meticulously turned out in a blue-and-white-striped costume with a smart little white hat, paused at the exit point when she saw them.

“Well,” she said, as Carter went very still and quiet beside Rosie, “don’t you two look . . . cozy.”

“Walk the other way, Chelsea,” Carter advised, and before Rosie could fully register the way her voice had trembled as she said it, Carter grabbed her arm and pulled her away from the steeplechase.

“That miserable . . .” she began, then trailed off and shook her head. “Never mind. She can’t ruin this. It’s your day, right?” she gave Rosie a little smile, though it looked strained. “You’re here to be ordinary. So let’s get ice cream and then we’ll see how you feel about the fun house.”

Rosie, to her own surprise, enjoyed both of those things. The ice creams were a bright spot of cool sweetness in the middle of a hot, smelly crush of a crowd. The fun house was pure nonsense, all moving floors and distorted mirrors, and she and Carter both shrieked and laughed their way through the obstacle course before breaking free into the open air once more.

“Where next?” Carter wondered. She walked, Rosie noticed, with an easy open stride and a wide, relaxed smile. It was the happiest she had looked since they met. “There’s the Bobs. It’s the new coaster. Maybe a little fast for you, though,” she gave Rosie a friendly bump with her elbow. “Thunderbolt is probably too much too. Maybe you’d like the Chutes? You get in a long boat and ride down a hill into a big pool of water at the bottom. Just one hill though. You could handle that.”

Rosie grew warm and proud under this generous estimation of her ability.

“Yes,” she said, “all right, we could try that.”

It turned out Carter was right, the Chutes was exactly the limit of what Rosie could handle. The whoosh of her stomach, the wall of water that shot up and soaked them . . . she was terrified and laughing at the same time.

They dripped their way happily down the boardwalk, arms linked as they tapped the water out of their shoes and wrung out the hems of their skirts. Somehow their arms stayed linked, warm and solid, as they wove their soggy path along the boardwalk.

Carter’s laughter suddenly choked off, and her arm went rigid in Rosie’s, so Rosie looked to see why and saw Chelsea was back.

Except Chelsea was not alone. Her friend Brooke was with her, and in the glare of midday Rosie was struck by how the other girl, who at school was perpetually a half-step behind her bolder friend, seemed like a watered-down copy of Bonnie. Her eyes were paler, her features less distinct, and even her hair, in loose finger waves instead of a tight, professional permanent, was an uncertain approximation of Bonnie’s style.

Rosie squirmed at the unkindness of her own thoughts. Carter was not squirming at all. She stood perfectly still, every muscle in her body locked in anticipation of . . . what?

Chelsea was looking at both of them, smug beneath the brim of her hat. She had clearly not ridden the Chutes. She must instead have sat somewhere cool and undemanding since they saw her last, because she looked far too neatly turned-out to have spent her day riding coasters and pushing her way through a funhouse. Carter, disheveled and damp-faced in comparison, nevertheless looked a lot more appealing to Rosie than Chelsea did at that moment. Carter’s chin was up and her expression was clear, if watchful. Chelsea looked like something about to pounce.

Rosie, almost without thinking, drew even closer to Carter.

“You two still out on the town, then?” Chelsea wondered. “Well that’s adorable, isn’t it?”

She paused, and when nobody said anything she shot a sideways glare at her friend and dug an elbow into the waist of Brooke’s pink and white crepe dress.

“Ow!”

“Isn’t that adorable, Brooky?” Chelsea prodded. Brooke, rubbing her ribs, nevertheless nodded in belated obedience to her cue.

“Yeah. Real cute.”

“I wonder,” Chelsea looked back speculatively at Carter and Rosie, “are there dinner plans?”

“We won’t be eating souls,” Carter retorted, “so you wouldn’t be interested.” She grabbed Rosie’s hand and pulled her sideways, away from the boardwalk. “Come on. Let’s get out of here.”

Rosie allowed herself to be pulled along, back through the crowds, all the way to the train shed. They boarded a train back to the city and still Rosie did not speak, weathering the crowds in silence. It was only as they transferred to the L at midtown that curiosity made itself master of her discretion.

“Carter, what were they talking about?”

Carter shook her head.

“Just . . . nothing. They’re two stupid girls whose parents named them after the neighborhoods where they were born. I don’t pay any attention to them. You shouldn’t either.”

“But it seemed to upset you. I want to know. What did they mean when—”

“Just leave it!” the yell exploded out of Carter as they left the train at their stop. “I don’t owe you anything that’s in my head, you got that? I was trying to do something nice for you today and the least you could do is not be such a god damn royal busybody!”

Rosie drew back abruptly, and knew that no part of her hurt or confusion could possibly have been hidden. Carter took one look at her face, shook her head angrily and stormed down off the platform, heading for home.

Rosie was left to follow at her own pace.

* * *

Supper that night was a tense, silent affair. Joe seemed vaguely aware that not all was as it should be, and he tried to provoke them to conversation.

“What do you girls have planned for tomorrow?”

Carter stabbed at an errant pea.

“Homework.”

“Well, that’s responsible,” Joe said cautiously. He looked to the opposite side of the table. “You doing homework with Carter, Rosie?”

Rosie opened her mouth to answer, then realized she didn’t know what the answer was.

“I . . .”

“That would be cheating, Dad,” Carter said scornfully. She grabbed a dinner roll out of the basket. “I’m going to get started.”

Then she disappeared into her bedroom, leaving Rosie to smile uncertainly at Joe.

“Do you have plans for tomorrow?”

“Kind of. I need to make contact with the Director and get a status report.”

“On my mother?” Rosie said breathlessly. Joe’s face twisted in what might have been an aborted expression of pity.

“Among other things. We’re trying to find some means to legally remove General Kane. The political situation in your part of the world right now means we really can’t just storm in, not without starting something much bigger. None of us want that. But if we can find him in clear breach of international statutes, it becomes a different story.”

“Invading Costa Luna wasn’t breach enough?” Rosie asked bitterly, then blushed at Joe’s surprise. “Forgive me. My temper—“

“No, no, don’t worry about it,” he said, still taken aback. “It’s funny though. You sounded a lot like Carter, just then.”

“Oh,” said Rosie. She tried to determine how she felt about that, and realized she really didn’t know.

* * *

For the rest of the weekend Carter did not make any sign that she was ready to re-enter into awkward pre-friendship with Rosie. She made a point of leaving every room Rosie entered, lugging a textbook away with her as she went. Rosie soon gave up on trying to speak to her, because Carter never responded.

Joe returned near supper time, and the careful absence of any expression on his face made it plain he’d not had any welcome news from the Director. Rosie steeled herself to ask anyway. She had to know.

“Uncle Joe, what did—”

He shook his head.

“Nothing. Not yet. Kane’s been careful. The whole coup was exclusively an act of Costa Estrella mounting offensive against Costa Luna. He kept it pretty clearly between your two kingdoms without involving another, and right now nobody’s angry enough at them to agree we should do something about it. This could still take some time, Rosie. I need you to be prepared for that.”

Rosie forced a smile, nodded, and quickly excused herself.

As soon as Rosie entered the bedroom Carter rolled off the bed, slammed her book shut and left without a word. Rosie, fighting bigger feelings than simple rejection, promptly rolled right onto the bed and buried her face in the pillows.

Maybe if she was very careful, she could manage to be quiet enough that nobody would hear her cry.

* * *

Carter was no warmer toward her on Monday at school, nor Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday besides. Rosie moved through the hallways alone, and by Friday she found it actually was not such a scary thing. Something about knowing a dictator had seized control of your kingdom and you had no idea when you could return meant that high school lost a lot of the intimidation factor.

It also helped that Rosie’s education had amply prepared her for most of what she had to do in her new American school. It did not help her blend in, but it did help her feel better about being as alone as she was at that moment.

Her penmanship and English composition were good, and French class was no challenge at all. One class she might have had difficulty with was Civics, because the government they studied really was foreign to her. However she engaged in the new material so enthusiastically, it more than compensated for the fact that the forms of government were relatively foreign topics.

The class Rosie would have trouble with she actually didn’t know was any trouble at the time. She thought she was doing well in Work Experience. They learned to draft letters of inquiry, request letters of reference, and present themselves for interview. Her poise and diction, the product of years of elocution lessons, seemed like nothing but an asset until the Friday afternoon that Dr. Lucey took the floor to explain what next week’s trip to Macy’s would entail.

The Macy’s placement was clearly Dr. Lucey’s pet passion. If he was aware that most girls in the class were only holding out for the chance to win a role in a moving picture, he graciously did not let on.

“My dear girls,” he said warmly, “I know that on Monday you will present yourselves to the Sales Manager in such a way as to reflect well on all of us here at the school. I have the highest confidence in your readiness to learn something of this excellent profession, and perhaps, for some of you, even discover a rewarding career path that will carry you far into the future.”

If any girl in the room was thinking she’d far rather be in pictures than stuck behind a sales counter, she held Dr. Lucey in too high esteem to show it.

None of that was the problem, though. The problem came in a moment very near the end, when Dr. Lucey concluded his speech by reminding them that their performance in this segment of the course would impact their ability to carry on with the rest of it; namely, to the end, and the screen test. So Dr. Lucey _was_ fully aware of what most of the girls in the course were hoping to get out of it.

“Don’t know why any of us would even bother with the screen test anyway,” one girl called Margaret drawled in apparent good humor. “Carter’s cousin there is bound to knock their socks off at first sight anyhow, don’t you think? She’s got a face like Lillian Gish and carries herself like she’s royalty. That’s movie star material right there. The rest of us don’t stand a chance.”

Most of the class giggled in agreement, and even Dr. Lucey and Miss Everett, their regular teacher, traded rueful smiles that seemed to indicate they shared some agreement with the statement. Rosie felt her face heat fast and fully.

Somewhere behind her, though, through the general sounds of agreement, she heard a sharp, almost angry intake of breath.

Before she could turn around to see who else had not been in on this open secret, the bell rang and Dr. Lucey ceded the floor to Miss Everett, who reminded them of their duty to arrive at Macy’s promptly by seven in the morning, then dismissed the class.

Rosie had not made it three steps into the hallway before, from the regular crush and rush of moving bodies at the end of day, Chelsea and Brooke appeared to bear her up at the elbows. Rosie squirmed as their hands wound around her forearms, clinging and overly familiar.

“Hi Roe!” Chelsea chirped. “Going our way?”

Rosie blinked and resisted the urge to pull on her arms a third time.

“I—my name is not Roe,” she said, since this seemed the easiest point of correction. Chelsea laughed, as if this were the best joke she’d heard all day.

“Oh silly! It’s your nickname. What we call you for fun. Like she’s Brooky, and I’m Chels.”

“Actually, Rosie is already my nick—“

“Won’t you come out for ice cream?” Chelsea wheedled. “We always go out for ice cream after school you know.”

Rosie hadn’t.

“Don't you only eat sole?” she said. A hint of rosy color darkened the warm tone of Chelsea’s cheeks, then quickly settled down, as if she’d got her temper quickly under control.

“Oh, that’s just Carter’s little joke,” she said tightly. “You can’t pay too much attention to Carter or else she starts to think she matters. Now, what do you say?” she pulled harder on Rosie’s arm, so that her fingers dug in and Rosie felt like she was fighting some massive bird whose talons had dug in at both sides. “It’s gruesomely hot out. A nice cool treat is just what you need. Come have ice cream with us and let’s all be friends.”

It did not feel like a very good idea. But then, there wasn’t a whole lot to recommend returning to the apartment with Carter, where Joe would almost certainly be gone on some kind of sales call and Rosie would have to do her homework in whatever room Carter wasn’t.

“All right,” she heard herself say, “I would like this. Getting ice cream and . . . being friends.”

And if Chelsea and Brooke traded strangely triumphant smiles at this announcement, well, Rosie didn’t think it was her place to wonder why.

* * *

Everybody from Work Experience class arrived at Macy’s on Monday with excruciating punctuality. Twenty-three girls groomed to within an inch of their life huddled outside the side entrance to receive a short, bracing speech from Dr. Lucey before they were given entrance to the building and reprieve from the bite in the air. Over the weekend the temperatures had plummeted; gone was the oppressive heat of the past week, and now everybody was bundled against the chilly reality that in the final week of September, fall had found the city with a vengeance.

Rosie’s coat offered her acceptable protection against the weather, but it didn’t help with the chill in Carter’s attitude. Carter didn’t even seem _angry_ at her, so much as determined to avoid having any reason to be in Rosie’s company or exchange words with her.

Put like that, Rosie supposed it did sound like anger. But it didn’t feel like it, and if she hadn’t had the new companionship of Chelsea and Brooke, who were just as clingy and chatty today as they had been on Friday, she might even have been tempted to see if she couldn’t persuade Carter to start speaking to her again, or at the very least, explain clearly why she’d stopped.

Instead Chelsea stood to her left and Brooke stood to her right as they all gathered in the ladies’ cloakroom to receive their smocks and subsequent inspection. Everything was checked, right down to their fingernails.

“Look at this!” an associate saleswoman blustered at one point. “Why I wouldn’t let you wash my dog with these hands, never mind sell me a nightgown. To the sink with you at once, my girl.”

The mortified student rushed headlong to the sink and scrubbed vigorously at her fingertips with the brush provided. Rosie flinched. She wondered if anybody in her own household had received such a dressing-down on her account; it was uncomfortable to think they might have.

Chelsea did not seem to suffer any pang of sympathy; she dug her elbow into Rosie’s side and delivered an exaggerated roll of her eyes.

“You can fail the course for that. She had better hope nobody tells Dr. Lucey.”

“Why would anybody tell him?” Rosie wondered.

“To get her in trouble of course,” Brooke said, like it was the most perfectly obvious thing in the world. Chelsea was a little more self-consciously tactful.

“They would probably think it was their responsibility,” she said primly. “We wouldn’t want her to reflect badly on the school.” And she smiled, tight and flat.

Rosie was still mulling this over as her own palms were flipped up and down by a different sales associate, a tall, lean rail of a woman with her years of retail experience carved in every dour line of her face. Rosie, still very unaccustomed to being handled by strangers, covered her unease with a tiny smile.

“Good morning,” she said. The woman raised an eyebrow.

“Not bad.” She dropped Rosie’s hands. “You’ll want to be a little louder with the customers, but the tone’s all right. Here, like this.” And she entirely transformed her expression of bitter efficiency into something very aristocratic and refined, with a remote and gracious smile. “Good _morning_ , Madam.” Then the expression melted away like the commercial construct it was, and she gestured to Rosie. “Again.”

Rosie, unprepared for a test so early in the day, quickly squared her shoulders and tried to copy the smile.

“Good morning, Madam?”

“Not a question. A statement. You’re welcoming them. It’s your counter and they are guests. Try again.”

That bit of instruction helped. For a moment the dark-paneled room and the utilitarian carpet fell away. Rosie remembered afternoons at her mother’s side, welcoming guests to their home.

“Good morning, Madam,” she said. Her voice was her mother’s; clear, rich and warm. When she came to herself again, she saw the saleswoman smiling in mild satisfaction.

“Yes, that’s exactly it. You’ll do. And these are your friends?” she eyed Chelsea and Brooke with slightly less favor. “I suppose you’d like to work counter together.”

Rosie was about to assure her that it didn’t matter at all, but Chelsea pounced straight away.

“Oh yes, could we? We’d just love that.” And she linked arms tightly with Rosie, so that Rosie’s answering grimace might have been mistaken for a smile.

“That should be fine. Come along then, all three of you.”

They hurried in her wake. She led them down the back stairs and out, across the sales floor to a particular area. “This is my section. I have three departments under me, and any one of the girls here will tell you I do not stand for nonsense. It is a very sound scheme your principal has, bringing you here. This is a good line of work, with much room for advancement. But every year, modern parenting being what it is, I find there is invariably one girl from your school who proves she is hardly cut out for any work at all, never mind the particular demands of retail. I trust,” she pinned each one of them with an icy stare, “that I will not find that girl among _your_ number.”

All three quickly shook their heads.

“Very good. Now come this way, and I will show you the stockroom.”

The rest of the time before the store opened was spent following in the wake of their mentor. She was called Miss Jones and she had not been untruthful; she did not stand for nonsense. Even Brooke’s habit of giggling at everything Chelsea said was nipped in the bud, so that Brooke went around with her cheeks bulging and her eyes glassed over at the effort of holding in what Miss Jones referred to as “audible inanity.”

She showed them where various pots and boxes of each product sold at their counter were available. They had to climb ladders in search of some, and she was particularly strict that they should not do so when any male sales associates were in the room.

“This is Macy’s,” she rapped out, when Brooke seemed inclined to giggle at this too. “There is still a standard.”

Then the store opened, and if they thought they’d been busy before, they soon learned what busy really was. Rosie barely had time to notice that Carter and another girl from their class were at another counter on the same floor before the shoppers flooded in, and she forgot everything but smiling, bidding strangers good morning, and rushing to fetch and carry for them.

It was the most physically demanding work she’d ever done. The carrying of things wasn’t so bad, but the running back and forth, climbing up and down the ladder, often for items that would be squinted at and rejected anyway, made her knees wobble. She didn’t much care for the height of it, either, though she learned to look up instead of down and that helped a little.

The speed of it and the mind-numbing blur of faces, some pleasant, some very much less so, was almost certainly the reason she didn’t see it coming. Dr. Lucey had come onto the floor and was speaking with the sales associate who had charge of Carter and her classmate. Rosie had returned an assortment of rejected stock and was descending the ladder when Chelsea entered the stockroom, browsed a lower shelf, made her selection and then beamed up at Rosie.

“Oh Roe, there you are! Here, let me get that for you.” She steadied the ladder while Rosie reached the ground. “Look, would you mind taking this back to the counter? It’s for the lady in the sable coat. I need to pick up more things, and I’m afraid I won’t be able to carry it all in one trip.”

“Yes, of course.” Rosie took the little packet in hand, crossed the floor with blind familiarity and arrived at the counter with her smile firmly in place.

“Here you are, Madam. I think you’ll find this is what you were wanting.”

She set the packet up for the inspection of a tall, wide woman in a luxurious dark fur coat. The lady squinted at the packet, and her face mottled with anger.

“What do you mean by this?”

Rosie blinked, the ease of routine faltering around her.

“This is what you needed.”

The customer, to judge by her rapid inhalations, did not agree. Rosie quickly turned the packet around, scanning the label.

“Roseman’s Slimming Preparation,” she read aloud. “Isn’t that that you wanted?”

“It most certainly is not!” The customer’s voice had risen in sharp indignation. “That’s quite a nerve you have, young woman! Exactly what do you mean to suggest by offering me this?”

Rosie took a self-defensive step back from the counter, and the space was immediately filled by Miss Jones. She spoke in the same soft, soothing tones one would use on a frightened horse. Rosie caught some of it, a gentle mixture of apology and explanation, but she was too confused to follow the gist. When Miss Jones made a gesture behind her back that Rosie was to remove herself and, presumably, the offending package, Rosie was only too happy to obey.

She hurried back to the stockroom in a flurry of confusion and embarrassment. Chelsea was still slowly gathering objects from the shelves when she arrived.

“I think you must have given me the wrong item,” Rosie said apologetically. She held it out to Chelsea. “The customer was very upset.”

“Oh, _no_!” Chelsea’s mouth pulled down in chagrin. “I didn’t get you in any _trouble_ did I? Did Dr. Lucey see?”

“I—I’m not sure,” Rosie admitted. The thought hadn’t even occurred to her. “I think he was on the floor but he might have been speaking with somebody at the time.”

“Oh. Well, that’s all right, then, isn’t it?” Chelsea said, though her tone suggested it might not really be. “Anyway, I’m sorry about giving you the wrong thing, she really wanted Rossman’s _Sleeping_ Preparation, so you can see how I got those mixed up, right? Look, I’ll put this one back for you, and you can get the right one. I’m sure that will make the customer happy.”

Rosie yielded the packet uncertainly. She really didn’t think she should go back out there right now, but maybe Chelsea was right. Maybe she was being too cautious about everything. She turned to look for the packet she needed, and saw it was way up on the tenth shelf, meaning she’d need to keep the ladder steady to access it.

“Chelsea, can you hold the ladder for me?”

“Of course, Roe. Here, can you put these back while you’re at it?” Chelsea handed her a couple jars of honey. “I forgot.”

Rosie faltered. Chelsea smiled sweetly.

“ _Please,_ Roe?”

“Yes, yes of course.” Rosie shook off the strange echo of a feeling that an invading army was imminent. She took the three jars carefully in the crook of her elbow, and started up.

It was just as she reached out to lay her hand on the packet that everything happened at once.

Her fingers closed around the edges of the box. The door to the storeroom opened and Dr. Lucey came in. Chelsea said “oh silly me, not that one, it’s over there!” and gave the ladder a sharp push. Rosie teetered, shrieked, and dropped all three jars of honey in a failed bid to keep hold of the ladder. Her legs pedaled wildly in midair and she dropped six rungs before she was able to grab hold of the seventh. Her arms wrenched at the shoulders. She cried out, and dropped two rungs more.

“Here, here,” Dr. Lucey called, “hold on now.”

He was reaching out to support her. She might have managed to hold on long enough, but Chelsea stepped back from the ladder and somehow the locking bolts on the wheels must have given way because they spun out wildly and Rosie dropped with a crash into a pile of broken glass and honey.

“Oh _no_!” cried Chelsea. “What a shame. Roe, are you all right?”

But Rosie had no chance to answer before Chelsea was knocked to one side, thudding into a shelf as Carter pushed past her, transparently furious.

“Are you okay?” She bent over beside Dr. Lucey, and he gladly yielded the task of inspection. Carter trailed hands carefully down Rosie’s arms, then along her legs. “Are you cut? Is anything broken?”

“No,” Rosie shook her head. “No, I . . . I’m very sorry,” she looked up at Dr. Lucey in anguished regret. “For the damage.”

 “Yes, well,” Dr. Lucey was frowning, like he knew he was missing something here, and wasn’t ready to scold until he knew exactly what it was. “I’m glad you’re unhurt. Perhaps, Miss Mason, it would be best if you took your cousin home for the remainder of the day. She’s had a very lucky escape.”

Carter, having satisfied herself that Rosie was as unhurt as she claimed, looked back at Chelsea and scowled.

“Yeah,” she said, “real lucky.”

Rosie let Carter help her to her feet, still not fully comprehending what had happened. Carter steered her out the door, keeping herself between Rosie and Chelsea. She led the way up the back stairs to the staff locker room, which was where Rosie finally felt herself enough to admit “I don’t understand.”

“No?” Carter stripped off her smock and stuffed it aggressively into a laundry bin. “Well, I’ll explain it. Chelsea knows you’re competition for that stupid film part and she thought if she could make you fail at this, Dr. Lucey wouldn’t let you finish the course and she’d be in the clear. She set you up to get in trouble. It’s what they do best.”

“Who’s ‘they’?” Rosie frowned, carefully removing her own smock and surveying the streaks of honey on the exposed part of her dress. “Chelsea and Brooke?”

Carter’s hand flexed over the handle of the locker that held their coats.

“Yeah,” she said. “Sure. Chelsea and Brooke.”

She hauled their coats out, watched Rosie blot futilely at the sticky mess on her skirt, and shook her head.

“No, here. Let me.” And she took the sponge capably in hand, wiping off, if not all off the mess, at least the most visible parts. Rosie stood still, accepting the ministrations until Carter stood back and shrugged.

“It’ll do. Now get your coat; we’re not sticking around here for you to face the rest of them.”

Rosie followed meekly, coat wrapped around her. They headed west when they left the store, which felt wrong, but surely Carter knew what she was doing. It wasn’t until they reached a street corner Rosie knew she definitely had not seen before, and started down the steps to the subway, that Rosie felt she really had to ask.

“Is this the train to get home?”

Carter shook her head. “No. We’re not going home.” And she boarded, leaving Rosie little choice but to follow.

* * *

Uncle Joe had been right. Central Park was definitely more Rosie’s speed. The crush of the city, which had become a lower-level but persistent discomfort for her since her arrival, fell away in the open green space of the park. The air was clean and cold. Her breath came lighter; easier. Even with everything that had just happened, she couldn’t help smiling.

“Sorry,” Carter said, jamming her hands in the pockets of her coat. It was the first time she’d spoken since the train. “About Chelsea, I mean. All of it. That shouldn’t have happened.”

“Carter, it’s not your fault. You have nothing to do with the sort of person Chelsea is, so what could you have done to stop it?”

“I could’ve been with you.” Carter looked sideways at Rosie, upset, apologetic and wistful all at once. “I should’ve been.”

Rosie gave a little shrug, her very own Americanism. She wondered what Señor Elegante, her household head of wardrobe and protocol would say if he could see his _princesa_ streaked with department store honey and shrugging her shoulders in public.

The thought did not bring the stab of homesickness she’d expected; maybe because Carter was right here, real and present beside her, and looking at her in such a way that Rosie was inspired to grab her hand and give it a reassuring squeeze.

“You are here now. That is all I could ask.”

They continued their walk away from the busiest parts of the path, deeper into the park. Carter made sounds a few times as if she were drawing breath to speak, but never managed to get the words out. Finally they had come to a section of path that had no other people in sight, and Carter just let it all come tumbling out.

“Bonnie kissed me last year.”

Rosie looked at her in polite confusion. Carter did not meet her gaze. She stared at the toes of their school shoes, now motionless on the crushed pea gravel of the path.

“We were decorating the gymnasium. There was some kind of . . . I don’t even remember. Something. We were both in the Service Squad so we were helping, and there was this moment, where we were alone, and she said she knew. Knew about . . . me. Which was news to me, I didn’t even really completely know myself, but Bonnie was so confident and she was so certain and so _beautiful_.”

Rosie nodded in solemn agreement.

“She is very beautiful.”

“So she leaned in and . . . and it was . . . I mean, it was perfect. For that moment it really was. But then Chelsea came in and Bonnie pushed me away and she acted like I’d been the one to kiss her and they all believed her. Because of course they did.”

Carter was still looking everywhere but Rosie’s face. She clutched and worried at her skirt as she spoke, the words coming faster and faster, thick with the threat of tears and a total loss of control over herself.

“So they took me to the nurse, I guess because they weren’t sure where else to take me, and I had to lie down while they called my parents. Dad was away. I don’t remember if it was a mission or just the salesman thing. He does both, you know. He’s really good at—at both.”

Rosie nodded, as if she knew.

Carter was still looking down, and the way her shoulders were locked, the way her breaths staggered out of her, Rosie was pretty sure this was the hardest part of her story to tell.

“So my mother came. And she took me home. And I wasn’t allowed to go anywhere until Dad got home too, and that’s when she went.”

Rosie blinked.

“Went . . . where?”

“We don’t know. Well, I don’t. I think maybe Dad might know, but he said we didn’t need her. That we could do just fine, only the two of us. And he didn’t try to get her back or anything. Not even once.”

Rosie stared in confused, pitying horror at this abyss of family drama that Carter had flung open to her. She had no idea where to start, but this seemed to be causing Carter pain to relive, so she decided to start there.

“Carter, you do not have to tell me all of this.”

“No, yeah, I think I kind of do?” Carter risked a quick peek up at Rosie’s face for the first time since she’d started to talk. “Because it has nothing to do with you, but I acted like it did. None of this is your fault. My mom was just looking for a reason to leave, because she was sick of her whole life not being the life she was born for, and I was the first reason she got. And I was looking for a reason to be mad at you for coming in like this, and Chelsea and Brooke being like that, all smug and hinting like you and I were maybe . . . well. That was just the first excuse. But it wasn’t fair. And if I’d stayed with you, instead of getting all mad last week, then Chelsea wouldn’t have been able to do this. So I wanted to tell you _why_ so that when I said I was sorry you’d know I meant it.”

Rosie settled on to the grass at the side of the path, and beckoned at Carter to join her. After a moment’s hesitation, Carter did.

“So,” said Rosie, “you are . . . that is, you are interested in . . .” She tried to find the appropriate terminology. “You prefer the company of girls.”

“Not all girls. Chelsea and Brooke can go jump into the Hudson for all I care. Bonnie too, I guess, though there was a time when . . .” And here she really did look like something hurt, deep inside. Rosie, seeing it, hurt for her.

“Bonnie too, then? She’s . . . that way?”

“I guess. No reason she’d have kissed me otherwise. If all she wanted was to make my life hell, she could have just told people it happened and they’d still have believed her. Bonnie’s like that. People want to believe her. They want her to like them. I did once, too.”

“She cannot be worth your effort if she does not like you,” Rosie said firmly. “Carter Mason you are one of the finest people I have met. Not just since I came to America; ever.”

Carter squirmed on the grass.

“Yeah, well, you’re a princess. How many people could you really have been allowed to meet, anyway?”

“Not so very many,” Rosie agreed, “but that is for my own protection. You see, a princess can rarely be sure who her true friends are. Today, though,” she reached over to squeeze Carter’s hand, “I am sure.”

Carter smiled uncertainly in response, and Rosie, tsking softly, fished a handkerchief from the pocket of her coat and wiped at Carter’s cheeks. Carter laughed, tugged the handkerchief away and finished the job herself.

“Not looking for another mother, thanks all the same.”

“I am not interested in being your mother, Carter,” Rosie said, and watched with friendly affection as Carter finished tidying herself up. “Really, I think you must be very brave. Some of the girls at school said there are nightclubs you can go to where women and men are . . . as you are. But they talk about such things like it is a big, thrilling secret. And here you are, talking about it like it is everyday.”

“Well, for me I guess it is.” Carter handed the handkerchief back. “Or it could be, in a few years. It’s not as big a deal in the city if you can be careful about it. There are clubs, like you say, and I think some people just live like that every day. Quietly, sure, but even so. I think I’d like that: having it be almost ordinary.”

“Princesses don’t have the opportunity to decide what will be ordinary for them,” Rosie said wistfully. “They don’t usually even get to have romances. If I wanted to have a romance, I would have to not be a princess anymore.”

“And it’s not like that’s gonna happen any time soon, huh?” Carter flopped back onto the grass, staring up at a blaze of October color and clear blue sky. “No matter who you fell in love with.”

“No,” Rosie agreed, “I suppose it will not.” She looked down at Carter, considering.

“Carter . . .”

“Mmm?”

“Why do you dislike that I am a princess so much?”

Carter didn’t answer. She didn’t answer for such a long time, Rosie thought she either hadn’t heard the question, or it had somehow angered her.

Instead, Carter’s breath finally went out of her all in a rush.

“Because of my mother.”

“Your mother also disliked—”

“No!” Carter put her hands over her face. “No, she _was_.”

Rosie blinked.

“A princess?”

“Yeah. I mean, not by the time I came along. It was all done by then. But she was born one. She was my dad’s first.” Carter’s fingers roamed anxiously through the grass, flexing, squeezing, pulling as if in an effort to uproot the very knowledge of her mother’s lost birthright. “He rescued her, but it wasn’t enough to save her home. She was safe but they destroyed everything. Her whole kingdom was gone.”

The memory came screaming back to Rosie, Uncle Joe’s expression in the narrow room on the Lower East side, when he said he’d seen it happen before.

She felt hot and cold all over.

“Carter, that means that you too are—”

“No,” Carter said sharply, sitting up abruptly, “no, I’m not. I’m fully officially _not_ a princess. There were at least nine different Parliamentary decrees before and after I was born, just to make sure of it. There isn’t even a kingdom anymore. I’m nothing. If you don’t believe me I can show you the papers to prove it, though we’d have to crack a safe to get at them.”

Rosie shook her head, laughing even as tears welled up.

“No, stop. I believe you. But why are you so adamant that it must be this way? Do you not sometimes wish . . . that is, what is so terrible about being a princess?”

“It’s not that it’s _terrible_ ,” Carter hedged. “It works for you, I guess. But don’t you think it seems kind of pointless, nowadays? Royalty and all. Princesses wear nice clothes and jewels and sit on a throne until someday, if they don’t start a war to get rid of you first, you’ll run a country whether or not people want you to or whether you’re any good at it.”

“I hope it is a little more than that,” Rosie smiled. “But I suppose this is a sensible point of view for a democratic American definitely-non-princess citizen to have. And I suppose it does allow you the freedom to know . . . yourself.”

Her expression softened.

“To know what you want.”

The stack of revelations Carter had made should have loomed like a wall between them. Instead it felt like a hedge, thick and protective, a buffer of secrets encircling them both and bringing them together.

Carter risked a very brief sideways glance at Rosie.

“And princesses . . . they don’t get to know what they want?”

Rosie shook her head.

“Not that way. Not for romance. We understand duty, though. And my duty has always been that I will marry somebody suitable and continue the royal line of Costa Luna. This never seemed like imprisonment to me. It was simply the way things were.”

Carter looked like she was scared to ask the question, but she also looked like she was scared not to. It came out barely above a whisper.

“And what does it seem like now?”

Rosie looked down at her hands.

“It cannot matter what it seems like now. Because I hope that my kingdom is still there, and if it is, I hope that I can safely return. This is the thing I want most of all, so even if there were . . .” she struggled desperately against the thing she was not free to say, the thing she had only moments ago learned she might one day _want_ to say. “Even if there were something else I might want, it would not be something I safely could.”

Carter smiled, sweet and sad and wistful.

“Well hey,” she said, “even you’ve got to see the advantage a democracy would have over that.”

Rosie nodded. She mustered a smile despite the sting in her eyes and nose.

“Perhaps,” she said, “we can find room for royalty to make itself useful in this very modern, democratic society of New York. What do you say?”

Carter said yes.

Something about the way she looked at Rosie when she said it, though, told Rosie she’d better be careful whatever she asked for after that. Because Carter, in that moment, had the look of somebody who would not have been able to say no. And the most frightening thing was, Rosie could imagine all too easily how that felt.

* * *

Years later, when asked to describe that October, Carter would only ever be able to muster a sheepish smile and shrug. Rosie, a little more wholly in touch with her feelings, was heard to say that October was the closest thing to perfect either of them had ever had.

There was school, and that was fine. Rosie was not expelled from Work Experience. She had presented herself to Dr. Lucey the very morning after Chelsea’s attack and said simply that she had taken on more than it had been wise of her to attempt. Dr. Lucey, plainly aware of Rosie’s history as it had been relayed to him, was awkwardly conciliatory in response.

“Not at all, Miss González. Not at all. I forget how recently you joined us; you are not used to this sort of school, hmm? I hope you will continue in the course, and make wiser choices in the assumption of your workload going forward.”

Rosie promised that she would, and she insisted to Carter that the matter rest there. Carter longed to revenge herself on Chelsea for Rosie’s sake, but Rosie was adamant that they must not.

“Her trespass was against me, Carter, which means the choice of response is mine. I choose to make none.”

“Stupid royal principles,” Carter grumbled, but her head was nestled against Rosie’s arm as she said it, bumping up and down with the rock of the train car as they rode home, and that removed any sting from her derision. “All right. No revenge. I’ll be all _princess_ about it, too. How’s that?”

“Carter, you _are_ a princess.”

“Stop that. I already told you—”

“I know what you told me. But still, in a _certain_ sense we have that in common. Maybe the problem is that you just don’t feel like one.”

Carter looked like she didn’t think that was the problem at all, but Rosie was so caught up in the idea, her face flushed, her eyes bright, that Carter didn’t have the heart to say so.

“Okay,” she said, “so . . . what d’you suggest we do to fix that?”

Rosie’s smile widened.

It turned out, there were a lot of princess things you could do in New York, and Carter spent more of October doing them than she would ever admit to anybody, ever. Rosie dragged her all over the island of Manhattan, with some help and guidance from Joe. She had asked him about opportunities for everything from charity to high tea, and he did her the enormous courtesy of not asking why she wanted to know. He had furnished only many directions and, after a few more careful queries, a considerable amount of money as well.

“Oh,” Rosie faltered, staring at the roll of bills. “I don’t think . . . I mean, thank you, very much, but—”

“It’s fine, Rosie.”

“Maj—Uncle Joe, really. I couldn’t possibly—”

She didn’t know how to say it politely. He saved her from having to.

“I insist. I want you both to have some fun. It’s been too long for either of you. You’re kids, you need to enjoy yourselves, and this will help you do it. Just, home by nine on weeknights, all right? School comes first.”

Rosie accepted the money.

So there were trips to visit shut-ins, delivering food and company in equal measures. They escorted small children out of the city on a sponsored fresh-air weekend, delivering them into the care of smiling farmwives upstate and sharing an empty car on the last train back to the city. Rosie fell asleep with her head in Carter’s lap, and she looked so peaceful, so without care, that even though it cost her all feeling in her right arm Carter didn’t have the heart to wake her until they reached Penn Station.

Her arm was numb the rest of the way home, but the tingles of feeling that crept back in were comfortable; welcome, even, and almost probably maybe possibly not at all related to the fact that Rosie, on learning her hand had gone numb, promptly took it in her own and rubbed it gently to restore warmth and feeling.

They didn’t only do charity work, either. They went to see a tickertape parade held in honor of Queen Marie of Romania when she landed in New York. They caught only a passing glimpse of the queen, and Carter was on the verge of saying she didn’t see what all the fuss was about, when she caught sight of Rosie’s face. The shadowy longing there bit into her chest. Instead of making a smart remark, she held Rosie’s hand extra-tight on the walk home.

Finally, it turned out that Carter had been right: there was high tea at the Waldorf, and to her horror Rosie insisted they both go. She tried to beg out of it on the strength of having nothing suitable to wear, but Rosie waved the objection aside as if it were nothing.

“You can borrow something of mine. We can get hats and gloves that look nice enough to wear once, and nobody will say a thing. Believe me, Carter, it’s not whether or not you actually belong, but whether you _feel_ that you do. When you feel it, you show it.”

“In that case,” Carter grimaced, “we’re toast.”

But it turned out, once she was wearing the same dusty rose dress Rosie had worn for her first day of school, the spots sponged out of her best coat, her hair properly waved and a smart hat from Woolworth’s perched at a jaunty angle on her head . . . something changed. Carter spun a tenth slow turn, staring at herself in the Woolworth’s mirror while Rosie smiled proudly, and not a little smugly, over her shoulder.

“There. What did I tell you? All of it together, and you inside it? It just _works_.”

It really did.

Carter didn’t remember the last time she felt this polished. She didn’t think she ever had. Everything about it, from the pink cashmere dress and shiny black shoes to the subtle sparkle of the most discreet costume jewelry that ten cents could buy . . . it looked _right_. Even her hair didn’t betray the fact that it owed its sleek waves to a home-set kit. It looked like quality.

So did she.

She tugged at her skirt, considering.

“Is this really all princessing is? Just, showing up in a nice dress, doing good things and looking the part?”

“That’s some of it.” Rosie rested her chin on Carter’s shoulder, smiling into the mirror at her assessment. “It’s also a terrible lot of politics and being worried for everyone, all the time, because you feel you are responsible for all of them.”

“Well, that puts a damper on it. Sounds stressful.”

“Yes.” Rosie’s expression took on a more distant look. “And not only for princesses. My father was like that too. He was everything to everyone . . . or, he tried to be. He felt it was his calling. But his heart couldn’t handle it, in the end. So he left his calling to me.”

Carter’s eyes met Rosie’s in the mirror. For the moment she did not see her friend’s readiness for their latest adventure. She didn’t see the rich green dress that made Rosie’s hair glow warm and auburn; she didn’t even register the glint of a locket brought all the way across the ocean, the only piece of her homeland Rosie could still lay hands on. She saw only the impossible weight that Rosie carried, and she wanted to lift it off.

Carter tipped her head back and brushed a kiss over Rosie’s cheek, just in front of a stray curl that had worked its way loose from an army of anchoring pins. Rosie’s face softened, and she tilted her head closer to Carter’s.

It was a very long moment before she spoke again.

“I suppose above all, being a princess means saying no to some things when you wish with all your heart you could say yes instead.”

It was rejection; it should have hurt. Except somehow it didn’t. It was rejection and acceptance at the same time, and it filled every inch of space inside Carter’s head and chest until she felt hot and dizzy and glad all over.

“Come on then,” she said, “let’s go be princesses about this together.”

* * *

Tea at the Waldorf was a muted, glittering affair. They ate everything served, some of which Rosie knew the name of and some of which she didn’t. They tried to converse about serious things, like the weather and politics, but their serious faces made each other laugh too hard to keep it up. After that they talked about whatever they wanted, without caring if it was important enough for the Waldorf, until they had ate and drunk their fill. Then they dragged their full, sloshing stomachs home to spend the rest of the afternoon on homework.

With the start of November looming on Monday, the final unit of their Work Experience course would begin. Both girls felt the restlessness of the thing looming over them.

“It’s not that I even want the part,” Carter tried to explain. They had changed out of their tea clothes, the illusion of wealth collapsing in a heap of expensive fabric and cheap accessories. Now they faced each other across the kitchen table with a pile of notes and books between them. “I just really don’t want Chelsea to get it, or Brooke. Anybody else could, for all I care, but I really think it should be you.”

“Why me?”

“I don’t know. It just feels right. Call it the culminating experience of your American adventure? Becoming a film star. Doesn’t get more American than that.”

“But it isn’t a starring part you get, is it? It’s just a little role.”

“Not that you’d never know it the way Chelsea’s been carrying on,” Carter grumbled. “You better watch yourself these next couple weeks. I wouldn’t put it past her to shove you down the stairs so you get a black eye and fail your screen test. It would be just her kind of screwy.”

Rosie paled visibly at the threat.

“Sorry,” said Carter, “I didn’t mean to—I mean, it’s probably going to be fine. Just, don’t maybe go anywhere alone with her or you might end up with a split lip and look more like Charlie Chaplin than Mary Pickford, you know?”

“I don’t, really,” Rosie confessed. “They’re actors?”

Carter groaned.

“ _How_ do you not . . . right. That’s it. We’re going to get you an education.”

“Aren’t we already—”

“Not with books,” Carter flipped hers closed, “with movies. You’ve been teaching me all the princess things but I haven’t taught you enough American girl things. You still haven’t seen a movie, it’s all my fault, and I’m going to fix that. Tonight.”

“But what about our homework?”

Carter was already disappearing into her bedroom, but her answer floated back through the open door.

“That’s why we have Sundays!”

* * *

They walked to the nearest playhouse, which was just down the street.

The air was clear and cold. Somehow it felt natural to lean in closer to each other, arms linked, and enjoy the warmth that their bodies provided.

When they reached the box office Carter asked for two fifty-cent tickets, which were provided on smeary pasteboard. Inside the muffled plushness of the room, Rosie let Carter nudge her into the correct section and seat, settling into the deep velvet of the cushion with conscious delight.

“It’s a little like the opera.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” said Carter. Distantly, as the lights were lowered and the curtain raised, to the bright and merry jangle of a well-tuned live piano, Rosie could remember a time only some weeks ago when Carter would have said the same thing in a very different tone. Now, instead of flat and hard, she spoke with an easy fondness that warmed Rosie all over.

Carter would take her word for it. But maybe someday she wouldn’t need to. Maybe, Rosie’s fantasy drifted freely into the future, someday she could show Carter herself. Take her to Costa Luna, when this was over, and invite her to the tiny Royal Opera House.

The idea of Carter, dressed by Señor Elegante and glittering expensively on Princess Rosalinda’s arm . . . for a bright and wonderful second, the dream was as sharply painted as if it were happening now. She pictured the sleeve of Carter’s coat as a white silk glove all the way up to her elbow. Rosie thought, faintly, foggily, feverishly, of the night that would follow after she had peeled those gloves off, and there was nothing between them but . . .

Then all at once, her mother’s face loomed larger than life before her. Not a memory, not a reality, but a bizarre black-and-white blur of motion and soundless replication of life.

“What—”

Her mother was on the screen of the theater.

“What is this?” she cried, and Carter shushed her, along with a few other irritated patrons of the playhouse.

“It’s okay,” Carter said soothingly, “it’s the movie, Rosie. I mean, not yet, it’s just the newsreel, but this is what it’s like. Are you okay? Should we go?”

Carter would not have been able to pry Rosie out of that seat even if she’d set the whole place on fire. Rosie stared, shocked, barely comprehending, at grainy footage of her mother being paraded on the palace balcony by the man who’d stolen her home.

 **The queen of a picturesque island nation,** the subsequent title card proclaimed, **announces her betrothal to the military leader of a neighboring country. The quaint pleasures of these Mediterranean kingdoms are certain to be amplified when the happy event transpires in the New Year.**

Then followed some incomprehensible nonsense about Queen Marie of Romania’s ongoing tour of America, but Rosie was far past pretending to listen. Instead of piano music she heard only the echo of her own heart, galloping along at a speed to rival the Second Avenue L itself.

Her mother. Marrying General Kane. She couldn’t. It could not happen. She could not let it.

“—REALLY FUCKING SCARING ME RIGHT NOW!”

Carter’s scream penetrated the heavy thud of her pulse. Rosie looked up, the fog clearing as Carter shook it away—shook _her_ , by her shoulders, yelling in her face.

They were no longer in the theater. They stood on the pavement, a few evening revelers hurrying past the two girls who were clearly embroiled some sort of fight or fit or bizarre courtship ritual.

“Scared of what?” Rosie said. Carter slumped in boneless relief.

“I thought you were—I don’t even know what I thought. What was the _matter_ with you?”

“The screen—did you see it? My mother?”

“Queen Marie of Romania is your mother?”

“No, before that. My mother is the one who’s marrying . . .” but she couldn’t finish. Carter scrunched up her face in confusion.

“The guy with the sword? Why would she marry him?”

“She wouldn’t!” Rosie’s denial exploded out of her in a shriek. “He must be forcing her, in order to secure the kingdom, or . . . or . . .”

“Or bring you back to it,” Carter finished. Her face tightened all over. “We need to tell my dad.”

“No! No, we can’t. Don’t you see, I have to go back.”

“Um, no, I definitely do not see that you have to go back. Isn’t that what you’re not supposed to do? Not until it’s safe.”

“It doesn’t matter now. I need to go to her before it happens.”

“But—what will he do when you get there?”

Rosie spread her hands, palms up, in a simple gesture of fatality.

“Whatever he likes. As long as my mother is safe.”

“Rosie, you can’t.”

Rosie smiled sadly, half charmed by Carter’s desperate insistence, half jealous of it. Carter could not know what this was costing her, even to contemplate leaving this place and everything—everyone—she had found here.

“You’re so lucky, Carter,” she said softly. “You have your father here, safe, with you. You look after each other. I think you understand why I must.”

“Please,” Carter’s voice was thick with tears, “we’ll figure something out, there’s _got_ to be a way.”

“I could never take that chance, Carter. She  _needs_  me.”

They stood facing each other for a moment, the emptiness of what had been their day spreading out between them. Carter rubbed her elbows against the chill, and for a moment Rosie’s dream of the gloves she would wear flitted back. She shook her head to clear it. The dream died a quick, aching death within her.

“I am sorry to have frightened you. Please, let’s . . . let’s go back and watch the movie, if they will let us. You were very kind to bring me here, and I would like to have this memory with you before I go.”

“Okay,” Carter whispered. “Okay, but look. Please promise you won’t leave tonight. Just wait until tomorrow at least? We’ll talk. Dad’s gone the whole weekend on sales calls, and you probably won’t even be able to book passage for a while yet, so just . . . just _wait_. Please? Promise.”

Rosie smiled damply, and nodded.

“Very well. I will not leave tonight. I promise.”

“Good. That’s . . . good.” Carter drew a deep breath and caught Rosie’s hand in hers. “Now let’s go to the movies. So you can always say that you did.”

They held hands the whole way in, all through the picture, and all the way home.

Inside the apartment, before they put the lights up, Carter tried her luck a second time. Only this time, when Carter stood up on her tiptoes just inside the doorway and recklessly, desperately stole a kiss, Rosie did not have the heart to deny either of them. Instead she put her hand carefully to the back of Carter's head and gently stole it back.

* * *

Rosie struggled to fall asleep. Carter had predicted she would, and so politely excused herself to sleep in her father’s empty bed, explaining that Rosie would probably appreciate the space. Rosie had not, exactly, but she also appreciated the thought, so she lay awake for quite some time before she had to admit it wasn’t going to happen. She eased out from under the covers, into the living area and over to the other bedroom door.

“Carter?” she tapped softly. “Carter, are you still awake?”

No answer.

Rosie fidgeted, debated, then tapped again.

“Carter, I can’t sleep. If you’re awake, I’d . . . I’d be very grateful for the company.”

Still no answer.

Rosie debated another minute, then reached down to test the handle.

Locked.

A safety precaution, probably. Or was Carter angry with her again? If so, Rosie could hardly blame her. They had just got to this point where between them there was . . . well, Rosie wasn’t even sure what name she would put to it. But it was something good, and the thought of leaving now, even to save her mother, was almost beyond what she could bear.

It would have been good to wait up with Carter tonight. But maybe Carter felt otherwise, and Rosie could not bring herself to wake her and learn it was so.

“Good night, Carter,” she whispered to the unfeeling timbers of the door. Then she walked softly back to the other room and, after only a little more effort, managed to fall asleep.

* * *

Carter locked the door as a safety precaution. She could only imagine Rosie’s reaction to opening it and finding the bed empty; she did not want to have to explain herself to anybody at all tonight, if she could possibly help it. She’d smuggled a dark dress out of her bedroom under the drape of her dressing gown, and wasted no time on closing the door behind her to shimmy out of her nightdress and pull the black one on in its place.

It did not fit her very well; it had been one of Mother’s that was meant to be taken in at a few points, only Mother had taken off instead, and the dress had hung, neglected, on the hook ever since.

Now Carter tugged it into place as best she could, and tried not to mind how it flopped here and drooped there. She counted to a hundred, just to be certain that Rosie would have gotten into bed and at least tried to sleep. Then she eased up the sash of the window, edged out onto the fire escape and began a shaky descent.

Everything rattled. She was surprised the whole courtyard didn’t throw up their own windows and look out to see who was being burgled; when she landed and knocked her foot against a trash can, she was sure the Parsons family on the ground floor would emerge en masse to challenge her. When nobody woke, and the courtyard stayed dark, she let the breath rush out of her in a soft whoosh. Her chest expanded, she breathed a little easier, and started out the alley onto the street.

She didn’t risk the L. There was always a chance a neighbor might see her and remember, and while she wasn’t exactly sure of the full range of consequences for what she was about to do, she was pretty sure of a short list, and none of it was pretty. Witnesses were not something she could risk tonight. Instead she navigated the streets on foot, all the way over to the gleaming white glare of Broadway. There she merged with the crowds of theatergoers, pulled her hat down to shade her face and hailed a taxicab.

The driver seemed disinclined to rush, and she was disinclined to make him, since any disagreement only increased the likelihood of him remembering. She gave a cross-street several blocks away from her real destination, and settled back to pretend indifference. She didn’t even correct him when he took a more circuitous route than necessary. Her father’s habit of going the long way and doubling back had rubbed off at some point over the years. She rarely consciously thought of him as somebody who lived a dangerous life, but his habits were those of someone who did, and tonight she was glad to have learned them.

When the driver finally dropped her off, she had to count out more than half the money she’d brought, which would mean more of a problem on return. She tried not to mind; this was worth all that and more, if it worked.

The streets she hurried down now were ones she had not visited in years. It forced her to slow down and check a couple times, which was risky, because it made it plain she didn’t belong. Nobody seemed to spot her, though; at least, nobody challenged her, and she made it to the right address sooner than she’d expected.

The building itself was unchanged. Standing in the street staring up at it, she might as well have been five again, clutching her father’s hand as she came for the annual interview with the dour yellow-haired woman. The interviews had stopped when she was ten, because the final decree severing her mother’s entitlement to the last possibility of the monarchy had passed, and Carter was no longer a princess in even the most technical sense of the word.

“Go,” the Director had said kindly, “enjoy the rest of your life, and try to forget this place. You will be happier if you do.”

But Carter had not forgotten, and on the strength of that memory she slipped around to the back, picked the window that she knew some of the office boys had used to hang out of to smoke, and started up the drainpipe.

She hadn’t climbed a drainpipe in years, and if it hadn’t been for the ropes in gym class she probably wouldn’t have made it. Panting, gasping and feeling suddenly grateful for the forgiving fabric of her mother’s dress, she clung to the window ledge and reminded herself there was a very good reason for all of this.

She’d never seen anything scarier than the look on Rosie’s face when they sat in the theater that night. If Rosie left now, the fear on her face was all Carter would imagine for the rest of her life. That could not be the final look Rosie ever gave anyone.

She was not going to let that happen.

At first she thought the window was locked, and dread shriveled her stomach. Then a second, desperate shove budged it a little, and she found the energy to shake it gently in the frame until it jarred loose. After that it was precarious but possible to lean against the drainpipe and wedge it up just enough to gain clearance. Swinging into the little corridor beyond, she slumped to the floor and sucked in deep, greedy draughts of stuffy office air. The smell of ink and cardboard had never been so sweet.

Once she felt herself again, Carter eased to her feet and tried to get her bearing. This was the third floor. She’d never been admitted to the third floor. She had seen the fourth floor a few times, and all the interviews had been completed on the second. It was how she knew where she needed to be . . . except she had no idea how to get there.

Opening one door led her into a tiny, dark room. She blundered into a desk, then a chair, and finally found the relief of a door knob. That door yielded to . . . another tiny, dark room. And beyond that, another, and beyond that . . .

With growing disbelief, Carter groped her way blindly through a cramped, dark Purgatory of office cubbies. There was no end to them. She was almost positive she went through at least half of them twice, and some of those in reverse. About fifteen minutes after entering—or was it fifty?—she put her hand down in something wet, and, grimacing, wiped it off as best she could on the dark fabric of her dress.

She had no idea how long she spent groping her way through dark, claustrophobic rooms, but it felt like half her life had passed before, in a fit of aimless desperation, she decided to risk turning on a light.

First she felt all around the walls to confirm they were without windows, and then, some moderate assurance of privacy secured, she tugged the chain on the desk lamp.

The modest yellow glow nearly blinded her. She blinked, dazzled, and waited for her vision to settle. Once it had, she flinched again at the lurid scarlet paper on the walls and groaned at the sight of three doors, each of them set in a different wall. She had only a guess which of them she’d come in by. Rather than go blundering on again into the dark, she considered the room. The person who worked in it would know the way out. Maybe they had left some kind of indication . . .

No answer was revealed on the desk or the walls. But as she looked at the three doors again, she did see something there. Of the three dark iron knobs present, one stood out. Not a lot. Hardly even a little. But of the three knobs, it was unquestionably the brightest, as if it had received a little extra attention from one dedicated hand on exit at the end of each work day.

It wasn’t a certainty, but it was as good as she was likely to get. Carter shut off the light, groped her way toward that door, and turned the knob.

In each of the subsequent twelve rooms, she repeated the exercise. Felt her way around the wall to check for windows, then turned the light on to check the door knobs. Every time, she went through the door whose handle bore most frequent signs of wear. Sometimes the door with the brightest handle was the very door she had just come through, in which case she hoped she wasn’t just going deeper into the warren, and chose the next-shiniest.

She was still stumbling through rooms and nearly on the verge of doubting her theory when it happened: she turned the brightest, shiniest handle she had seen that night, and stepped out into the grey light of the landing beyond. Dark stairs stretched above her head, and the shadows of an unlit building swallowed them up below.

After the on-again, off-again bright and dark of her escape from the labyrinth, Carter thought the murky gloom was one of the nicest things she’d ever seen. Her heart beating a little faster, she started down the stairs to the basement.

She hadn’t been lying when she told Rosie she could show her the papers that proved she wasn’t a princess anymore, but she’d been lying when she said they’d need to crack a safe.

She didn’t have to crack it.

She had the combination.

Her father thought he kept it in code, but he wasn’t that good at codes, and Carter had known since she was little and used his Sunday crossword to kindle the breakfast fire that the smattering of words he’d filled in were more than just his way of killing time. He’d been  _furious_. She had never touched the Sunday crossword and its six random words ever again . . . until tonight.

Last Sunday’s paper had only a few hours left, at most. Carter didn’t know exactly when the safe combination was reset; it might even be that she was already too late. But every Sunday morning her father would walk out and come back with the paper, and he’d keep it until the next Sunday. So either there was a whole night that passed when almost nobody knew the combination, or it was reset and shared with the people who needed to know first thing Sunday morning.

She was aggressively hoping that was the case.

Carter reached the basement and turned on the light without fear. The gas flared up in the pipes, hissing a welcome. She navigated the cold central hallway, turned left at the end and . . . there it was.

Just waiting for her.

She fished the crossword out of her pocket. It was simple enough to crack her father’s approximation of a code; once she was safely out of punishment timeframe for this, she’d need to tell him to develop a better system.

Her first three tries were off, because she’d misread one of the words he’d crammed into a space where it didn’t quite fit, but on the fourth, she got it. The bolts thudded back and she swung the door out to reveal a cavern of neatly stacked file boxes. The whole thing went back in three rows; two single along the wall, and a double in the middle. And god bless the efficiency of the Princess Protection Program: they were all in alphabetical order.

She needed two boxes. The first was Rosie’s, and she found it quickly enough. The file was slim, with only a collection of sketchy history of Costa Luna, some geographic coordinates and a typed mission summary, signed with her father’s own name in bold, broad strokes. The last item in the file was a sheet of closely-spaced typeface. That sheet was the one Carter needed; she looked down, past the current address of concealment—her own—and found the information she wanted. Having no place to copy it, she read and reread and re-reread it until it felt as if she’d seared it into the lobes of her brain.

She’d remember.

That accomplished, she still needed to check something else. The file she wanted now didn’t need to be searched for; it was her own. She already knew where it was kept. She’d watched her father and the director co-sign the final mission report in person, and they had brought her down to file it.

They had probably not imagined she’d be down here to un-file it, or they might have made her wait upstairs.

Carter’s file was much thicker than Rosie’s, spanning over a decade of interviews, but it was still thinner than the one that sat immediately before it. She deliberately did not read her mother’s name, reaching past to grab what she needed.

The final status sheet of her case was right on top. It was a dry collection of facts, but only one of them really mattered. It was what she thought she’d heard six years ago; what she saw confirmed now.

Suddenly, the breathless scramble since she had left the apartment was behind her. In its place was calm, clear certainty. She knew exactly what she needed to do. She also knew better than to risk telling Rosie any of it: Rosie would almost certainly say no, so it was important that Rosie not have the chance.

As quickly and efficiently as though she did this every day, Carter arranged the files in the necessary order, closed the safe, spun the dial and walked back down the hall. She left by the gallery stairs in the front, simply waiting below street level until nobody was walking past. Then she jogged lightly up the steps, onto the pavement, and disappeared down the street.

* * *

The next morning at breakfast, Rosie decided not to raise the subject of the locked bedroom door. Carter seemed exhausted, as if she had hardly slept at all. Maybe she’d had her own reasons for not wanting Rosie to come in, and Rosie felt she owed her the respect of not asking what those were. Instead, she cooked an egg for each of them and was thrilled when Carter seemed to want to talk.

“I’ve been thinking,” she said, “about this whole you-going-back thing.”

Rosie’s smile faltered.

“Carter, please don’t ask me not to go. You know if I had any choice I would stay here with you.”

“No, I know,” Carter promised. “I understand. I mean, if it were my dad? I’d do anything. She’s all you have. I do understand. What I was going to ask, though, is . . . can you wait? Not long,” quickly, as Rosie’s answer must have shown on her face, “just ‘til the end of the semester. Until after the screen test. If you go now, it’s going to be me in that class without you, and I don’t know if I could do that in front of Brooke and Chelsea. I’d like you to be there to finish it with me. Otherwise, it just doesn’t feel right.”

Rosie nodded. She tried not to hate her own relief at the reprieve, however temporary it might have been.

“Yes. Of course, I will stay until after the screen test. And Carter?”

“Mm?”

But she didn’t know how to say it. Didn’t even really know what to say, or where she could begin. Carter, with dark circles smudging the area under her eyes, nibbling at her fried egg like she’d been out all night instead of safe at home in bed . . . how could Rosie explain that this was one of the only things she ever wanted to see again, or how sorry she would be to know she soon never would?

There was no way. And even to try would only be cruel.

So she didn’t say it.

“Thank you,” she said instead. “For everything.”

Carter shrugged with one shoulder, sleepy, lopsided, and smiling.

“Oh sure,” she said. “No trouble at all.”

* * *

The next week Rosie booked her passage home with the last of the money Uncle Joe gave her. Carter had escorted her to the shipping office and discreetly left her in private, pretending she had a telegram to send. Rosie had been grateful for the illusion.

School was not exactly fun, but at least it was predictable and safe. The entirety of Work Experience was devoted to a very dull set of lectures on technical filmmaking, enlivened only by the surprising news that they would be the first class who got to try Fox Film’s new Movietone technology in their screen test. They would need to make a monologue, and were assigned to plan a costume that would pair suitably to the content.

“What sort of clothes do they wear in Costa Luna?” Carter wondered, as they made their way home at midweek. “Do you have some kind of traditional dress? You know, like kilts in Scotland and . . . and well, whatever they wear in other places.”

Rosie laughed.

“Señor Elegante would consider it an offense against his household to hear you speak of it so plainly. I do not know anybody who loves our traditions more deeply. Yes, there is a national dress. For the men, it is the costume of a farm worker, though more embroidered and lovely than any farmer would wear. For women, it’s a red skirt and white apron. The jacket is black, a scarf is worn on the hair and a veil over the lower part of the face . . .” Rosie faltered. She swallowed hard.

“It is simple, but . . . but very lovely.”

 Carter tucked her hand in Rosie’s.

“Show me.”

So they spent the afternoon going about to shops and seamstresses, begging and bargaining for an assortment of pieces that Rosie built into an approximation of the traditional dress of Costa Luna. Carter admired the arrangement laid out on their bed.

“Do you think it would be okay if I wore it for the screen test?” she wondered. “I mean, it wouldn’t be presumptuous, or anything?”

Rosie looked at her in deep surprise.

“Of course not. I would love to see you in it. But why?”

Carter shrugged.

“They make a movie of the thing, right? It would be a way for me to remember that you were here.”

Rosie was so touched by the gesture, it did not even occur to her to ask Carter why she was to be the one to wear it, rather than herself.

* * *

The week after that, they drafted their speeches for the screen test. Some of the girls complained bitterly that it was unfair they should now be judged on their voices as well as face, but Miss Everett was unmoved.

“Progress, ladies, invites that we adapt or collapse. If we cannot do the first, we are doomed to the second, so let us not be too Roman Empire about this. Now, rehearse!”

Carter grinned at Rosie over the edge of the piece she had asked Rosie to help her choose, a poem traditional to Costa Luna, and therefore perfectly complementary to her costume. But Rosie was looking down at her own paper, unresponsive.

“Do you think that’s true?” she reflected.

“What’s true?”

“That you adapt or collapse.”

“I dunno. Maybe? I don’t think it’s usually a choice, though. I think one way or another it’s just something that kind of . . . happens.”

“Yes, you’re probably right.” Rosie thumbed the edge of her own speech, a modified version of the paper she’d submitted for Civics class on the democratization of society. “But maybe some of us have less of a choice than others.”

“And maybe some have more,” Carter countered.

Rosie smiled faintly, inclined her head to cede the point, and gestured at Carter to start her piece from the top. She corrected her carefully, helping her improve pronunciation, and Carter was eager to respond.

“I want it to sound just like it would if you read it,” she insisted, and Rosie was happy to help.

Rehearsals continued through the end of that week, and the following week an executive from the studio made a brief appearance in the classroom to recite a short, dispassionate speech about how eagerly they were all anticipating the performance. He collected a list of names and performance pieces from Miss Everett, then hurried out the door.

Miss Everett made a little tsk of annoyance; apparently he’d promised them another twenty minutes, and she had nothing planned to make up the gap.

“Rehearse, ladies,” she suggested, so the girls drifted into groups, some of them still reading from their lines, others comfortable without, none of them particularly inspired to throw themselves into the performance on a Monday afternoon.

So when Bonnie put her nose in at the door and beckoned casually to Carter, it was difficult for the action to pass unnoticed. Carter betrayed open surprise, but, after a moment’s hesitation, headed over to the doorway.

Rosie hesitated only a moment longer, then edged after her, so she could stand with her back to the wall in a place where Carter could see her but Bonnie could not. Carter flashed her a tiny smile before focusing on the girl in the doorway.

“What do you want, Bonnie?”

“Well,” Bonnie’s drawl was particularly soft and sweet, “I thought maybe you might want to meet me in the Village this weekend. There’s an event down there I think you’d enjoy.”

Carter’s shoulders went rigid.

“Is that supposed to be some kind of joke? Because I am really not laughing.”

“Oh, I know,” Bonnie sighed. “That terrible thing last year. I’m sorry, it was too soon. I just wasn’t ready, you know? I still had courses to take this year, and I need commendations if I’m going to get into Barnard, so . . .”

“So,” Carter finished icily, “as soon as there was no risk to the future you’d planned for yourself, you decided it was safe to risk mine again.”

“Carter,” Bonnie said patiently, as if Carter were being unreasonably difficult, but Carter shook her head, her whole face drawn into a murderous scowl.

“Bonnie, you actually ruined my life. Do you really not . . .”

But of course Bonnie didn’t. Whether Carter had meant to say “see that” or “care” at the end of her sentence, it didn’t matter, because Bonnie lacked the capacity for either.

“I’m not going to the Village with anybody who wouldn’t want to be seen with me here, too,” Carter said. She stepped back. “Have . . . have a really nice life, okay, Bonnie? I mean it. But don’t ever expect me to be part of it.”

Rosie wished she could see Bonnie’s expression in response to that, but by the time she had reached for Carter’s hand, Bonnie had already vanished.

“Are you okay?” Rosie asked gently. “You were wonderful. You deserve so much better than that.”

“Yeah,” Carter sighed. “We both do.”

Then she returned Rosie’s squeeze of her hand with one of her own, and drew her back into the room to rehearse. She seemed lighter that day; more real. More vibrant. Rosie was almost sorry for the veil that would obscure the lower half of Carter’s face as part of the costume; she deserved to have her whole self shine for the screen test, which was now less than a week away.

As was Rosie’s trip home.

Rosie did not let herself think about going home very much. She focused on Carter instead; on the classes they shared, and the evenings they both spent at home, with Uncle Joe hovering a little more than usual, as if some instinct had told him he needed to stay close.

“No word, Dad?” Carter wondered on Friday night. They were all three grouped around the table, enjoying the meal Rosie had directed them in the preparation of. Joe, carving the small roast with the flair of somebody who had stepped into a stage role of his own, paused.

“Word?”

“You know,” Carter jerked her head in Rosie’s direction. “About . . . anything. The situation.”

“You know I can’t tell you that, Carter,” Joe said mildly. But he pulled Rosie aside after dinner and looked at her searchingly, as if she might somehow have heard something that he had missed.

She looked back in polite confusion, and at last he simply shook his head and patted her shoulder awkwardly.

“You’ve been a good friend to Carter,” he said. “Just wanted to thank you for that.”

Even more confused, Rosie said truthfully that it had been her pleasure. Then the three of them settled in to listen to a radio program, and Rosie was almost too distracted by the close scrutiny of Carter’s father to register the soft, near warmth of Carter’s body as she stretched out against her on the couch.

The whole thing was perfect.

None of it could last.

Rosie was grateful that the radio drama ended in tragedy that night, because it gave her a ready excuse for tears.

* * *

Joe insisted they spend the weekend together. They could choose the entertainment, he promised, and he would pay.

“I’ve been gone a lot,” he said, “and I want to make it up to you.”

Rosie tried to protest that it was unnecessary, but Carter only began listing things she wanted to do, and Joe agreed to all of them without any argument. Carter looked like she had won something, somehow, but Rosie couldn’t figure out what.

That weekend it was just the three of them. Uncle Joe made suggestions, but also fell in with theirs, which was how they came to a complicated program of museum, park, restaurant and Ziegfeld’s latest.

They had to return home to dress for that part of the day, and Rosie was done before Carter, which was how she found herself on the couch in the living room with Uncle Joe. He smiled at her as she settled in with him to wait for Carter.

“Having fun so far?”

“Oh it’s wonderful,” she enthused. “There’s so much, isn’t there? So much to see, and do, and at first I had no idea. When I came here it was terrifying. Now it just feels like . . . life.”

“Well I’m glad.”

A pause. Then, carefully, casually, she said “Have you heard any more news about my mother?”

She didn’t expect him to tell her. She even understood why he wouldn’t want to. His assignment was her protection, and telling her what was to happen to her mother would not contribute to any facet of that. But she did wonder if he knew at all.

The way he went perfectly still and quiet beside her told her the truth, even if he did not.

“Rosie, the minute there is anything I can tell you, I will. Okay?”

She smiled at him, wishing she could tell him exactly how okay it all was. He had his responsibilities, and she had hers. She understood him better than almost anybody. Their jobs were nothing alike, but they still had a certain amount of overlap in the area of duty. She felt no betrayal or resentment of his careful deception; only sympathy, and even a rush of gratitude. He really did want to keep her safe. It wasn’t his fault that she had to do something far more urgently than she needed to oblige him.

“Thank you, Uncle Joe.”

He shrugged, one-shouldered, just like Carter.

“It’s my job.”

“I don’t think that everything you have done today is part of your job,” she said fondly. “I think that today you just wanted us to be happy.”

“Princess protection isn’t my only job,” he pointed out. “Parenting’s another. I’m not . . .” he faltered. “I mean, it was a lot to ask of Carter. But you’ve been a good friend to her, and that’s worth as much to me as keeping you safe is to the Program. Do you see?”

Rosie nodded.

“Yes. I do. I feel the same way.”

He smiled at her in real gratitude. He looked like there was something else he wasn’t sure how to say; she saw it rise to his lips at least three times, only to be thought better of. Finally he just said, “She’s very lucky to have you.”

Whether or not what he’d wanted to say had been what she wanted to hear, Rosie chose to believe it was.

“We are very fortunate in each other.”

“Who, you and Dad?”

Rosie and Joe turned to see Carter in the doorway to the bedroom. She was leaning against the doorframe, grinning at them, wearing the same pink dress Rosie had loaned her for the tea room.

“No,” Rosie began to correct her, “you and—” but then she registered the twinkle in Carter’s eye, understood the joke, and smiled too. “All of us,” she said. “I think this has been just wonderful.”

“What,” Joe laughed, “are we going to a show, here, or a funeral? Come on, the pair of you. Let’s have some fun.”

The show _was_ fun. By itself, on any other night, Rosie would have thought it was the best part of her day. But today, with Carter on one side of her and Joe on the other, as if she were in particular need of shielding from the audience around them, she was conscious of something even better.

Something that could have been close to perfect, if only it were not for the sharply-defined threat against her mother and, by extension, herself that had reached all the way across the ocean into the very heart of the city that had been meant to keep her safe.

Now there was only Sunday left at home, Monday for the screen test, and then, Tuesday morning . . . she would go home. To her mother, her conquered kingdom, and whatever fate General Kane had designed for her there.

* * *

Sunday they spent at home until the very end, when Joe tried to make them supper and ended up apologizing profusely for his efforts and taking them out to a restaurant instead. That night before bed, Carter asked Rosie to help her assemble the costume she would wear for the screen test the next day, making it as close to authentic as she possibly could.

Rosie was happy to oblige. She helped her adjust the blouse, skirt and jacket, and tied the apron in place over top. Then she wrapped the scarf over Carter’s hair, so that only a narrow frame of lush black waves escaped to encircle her forehead. Finally she pinned a beaded square of cloth over the lower part of her face so that only her eyes, large, black and luminous, shone above.

Carter looked up at her in such a way that Rosie’s heart thudded painfully against her ribs. She felt it was betraying her to the silence of the room.

“There,” she whispered. Her voice cracked over the word. “It’s perfect.”

“I look right?” Carter asked anxiously. “I mean, it looks the right way?”

Rosie nodded. Her fingers trembled and she hid them in her skirt. “Yes. You look like home.”

Rosie could not see Carter’s mouth, but she knew from the way her left eye crinkled that it had just turned up at the corner.

Rosie, staring at her, hungry, wanting, could not smile back. Her eyes stung.

“Carter . . .”

“Hey,” Carter stepped forward, alarmed. “Hey, no, it’s all right. I’m sorry. Is it too much? Does it make you sad or something?”

“No, no, it’s perfect. You look beautiful. I just wish . . .”

She couldn’t say it. Could hardly even trust herself to think it. But understanding lit Carter’s face for a moment before shadow chased it back into hiding.

“Yeah,” she said hoarsely. “I think . . . yeah. Me too.”

Rosie helped her out of the costume. She memorized each fold of fabric, each seam, and every curl of thick dark hair that sprang free of the scarf she lifted off Carter’s head.

That night when they slept, it didn’t matter whether or not somebody’s feet were cold or their toenails were sharp or even if they snored. Rosie folded herself around Carter, wrapped her arms around her waist, and Carter scrunched up as tight as possible, as if she could make herself small enough that Rosie would never have to let her go.

* * *

Monday morning at breakfast, nobody seemed much inclined to speak. Joe drank cup after cup of coffee, Carter poked at her porridge and Rosie, who had been the one to make the porridge, did not chide her for not eating. There was a general listlessness to the whole thing.

“You girls have that movie thing today, don’t you?” Joe said absently.

“Yeah. All afternoon.” Carter dug her spoon a little deeper into the bowl.

“Mmm. At the Fox studio?”

“Uh-huh.”

He nodded, knocked back the last of his cup, and stood.

“Good luck, then. To both of you.”

“Thanks.” Carter didn’t look up. Rosie looked back and forth between them, by now almost accustomed to three hidden levels of conversation flowing back and forth between her roommates. Usually she could figure out at least one of them, but this time she was at a loss.

Joe left before they did, which was also unusual. Rosie commented on it as they started for the train, and Carter shrugged.

“I think he’s going back to headquarters today. Maybe they have a new assignment for him; he usually goes in early for those.”

It seemed plausible enough, but Rosie still struggled with a menacing restlessness all through the morning. She could not name the source of the feeling, but it grew steadily as lunch approached. By the time they gathered the pieces of their costume for the screen test and filed off campus, into the little bus that would drive them all to the studio, her nerves were teased to a frazzle.

Something was wrong. Something was going to happen. But she did not know what, or how to stop it. All she could do was watch and wait, as helpless as the day they had come for her.

Except she was not the same person now that she had been then. There would not always be a man with a sword to rescue her, because some threats could not be dealt with in that manner. It meant that some things, you had to do for yourself.

Thankfully, she was ready to do just that. She sat a little straighter as the bus carried them away from the school, into the unknown.

* * *

The studio was a flurry of activity. Carter found it contagious. Even with everything looming over her, with the plan she’d orchestrated so near to completion, there was something irresistible about the rush of energy that caught them all up.

They helped each other change into their costumes, giddy, giggling, running lines and critiquing each other’s performance. Carter’s costume was not the only traditional one present; a few girls had also dressed in something native to their homelands, and were rehearsing performances in that language.

Rosie plucked restlessly at her own outfit. It was far less elaborate than most of the others, a dark dress with some beaded embroidery, accessorized only with her locket. She’d adopted a hairstyle a few years too old for her age, waved and combed so that it stood out slightly from her head before the remainder was snugged into a heavy knot at the back and secured with an improbably long, heavy silver pin.

“You look like Mrs. Coolidge,” Margaret commented, though not unkindly. Rosie smiled.

“Thank you. I think that’s exactly what I hoped for.”

Carter spared her an encouraging smile from across the room. A pair of women entered and began arranging them in groups, which groups would then be guided into a waiting room, and one by one each girl would step into what was called the “sound stage” where she would give her dramatic performance. It would be filmed and recorded using the Movietone technology, which the women seemed to think should excite them all very much. Then they would be escorted to the screening room, and the final performances would be adjudicated.

“Now all the best to you, girls. And have fun!”

Rosie squeezed her notes tight in her hand, then folded them up and tucked them away in her pocket. No amount of rehearsal could help at this point, and truthfully, she did not need it. She knew what she wanted to say. She was glad Carter had insisted she remain to say it.

They went alphabetically, so Rosie was in the first half to go through. She found the sound stage smaller than she’d imagined; certainly it was no balcony. It was not the sort of place she thought of when she imagined making royal proclamations. But this was the new world, wasn’t it? They did things differently here.

So she accepted the efforts of the stage hands to position her in front of the camera, she ignored the strangeness of the microphone looming above her head, and she remembered exactly who she was.

And who she now knew she wanted to be.

“If it please the people,” she said, clear and confident, “let us consider the advantages of transitioning from a monarchy to a democratic society.”

And, in plain language, Princess Rosalinda Marie Montoya Fiore outlined her plan for the future of Costa Luna without once ever speaking its name.

* * *

Carter stayed in the waiting room. She also did not bother to rehearse. There was no need.

What was strangest to her about all of this wasn’t her plan itself, but the fact that her dad knew. How much, exactly, she couldn’t say, but he definitely knew. His behavior at breakfast had pretty much confirmed it. Hopefully the Director knew too. None of this would work if she didn’t.

Carter wore her costume like an armor and waited. She waited until she heard the door to the waiting room open behind her. An echo of multiple sets of heavy shoes reverberated, and when they were within a few feet of her, she pretended she had no idea they were back there, all of them (five, she counted. Five sets of feet. When had her father taught her how to do that? Years ago. Beyond remembering) and, unconcerned, launched into mid-recitation of the poem as Rosie had taught her.

Her inflection was Rosie’s, the accent too. It barely made any sense to her, but she knew she was flawless in the only way that mattered: in that place, for that performance, she _was_ Rosie.

When one of the men pressed up close behind her, one more stranger in a room full of them, and his breath heated the back of her neck, she stood a little straighter. Rosie did not shrink from this man, and neither would she.

“You chose your confidant poorly, Princesa. Come with me now, and there will be no need to harm anybody else in this place.”

She had not chosen as poorly as he imagined. If she had, it would not have worked to this point. She turned slowly; haughtily, wearing every part of Rosie like an extension of her costume. She remembered her proud fragility of months ago and adopted it now, just as Rosie had done. How had she _ever_ thought her stuck up? Rosie had been stretched nearly to the point of rupture. It had been all she could do to remember who she was, only to be told she had to forget all of it. If Carter could be half as strong now as Rosie had been for all of this, she’d be well satisfied.

Facing him she was glad of the veil, grateful to the man on the other side of the ocean, the unlikely double agent who, in response to the choppy query she had sent for help, a date and location and deadline for him to provide support to her quest to protect his princess, had cabled back a simple pair of statements:

NATIONAL DRESS OF COSTA LUNA HIDES FACE. WILL ENSURE GENERAL PRESENT AT APPOINTED TIME.

And now he was. Standing here, in front of her, threatening everybody who meant everything and nothing to her, if she would not go with him.

That was the plan. It was her plan. Even so, her nerve almost failed her. How did her father do this for a living? This was only once, and it was almost breaking her. But she was wearing a costume that meant everything to Rosie, and she was doing this for Rosie, who meant pretty much everything to her. So there was not a choice, really.

Adapt or collapse.

Or fight back.

She put up her chin and looked squarely at the man in front of her.

He was shorter than she’d expected, old and angry. He wore street clothes that didn’t fit. He held himself as tall as his meager height would permit, and he glared at her with such loathing, she half thought her veil would burn off at the force of it.

“I hope you are not thinking that you can raise an alarm without great cost to everyone present. You see, I have not come alone.”

The four other men she had counted were with him. Not an army by any stretch, but they moved like one. Carter knew what training looked like, and all five of the men in front of her looked . . . trained. They held themselves like her father did.

One was looking at her searchingly, as if something about her costume didn’t fit correctly, and she averted her face on instinct. If any of them did happen to have more than a passing familiarity with Rosie, it would be the worst outcome imaginable for them to discover her now.

She inclined her head, avoided the gaze of the one who seemed too interested, and advanced in front of them out of the room, back into the elevator.

The doors slid shut and they began their descent.

They pressed too close, all five of them, and she forced herself to measure every breath beneath her veil. This had been the plan, after all. Two miles off the coast, and then she could jump. Whether or not she made it back . . . but no. She could not think about that. She’d made it this far. She could handle the rest.

The elevator touched down in the lobby, the doors swung open, and they stepped out together.

* * *

Rosie could not be still. She could not calm down. She had thought she’d feel peace after her speech; a sort of finality. Even if she could never accomplish everything she’d outlined, it was there anyway, on record, her face and voice forever captured speaking her hopes for her homeland. If she did not survive her return to it, at least her ambition would live on and maybe someday it would come to pass.

But now, with every second that ticked by, the tension within her coiled tighter and tighter until at last she turned, grabbed Margaret by the arm, and said “Please—Carter. Has she come through yet?”

“No,” said Margaret, mildly surprised. She looked around. “Brooke, have you seen Carter?”

Brooke was slumped over in a chair, puffy eyed and listless. She had given a speech about the person she most looked up to, as had Chelsea. The problem was, they’d both given a speech about Chelsea, and it had apparently had a transformative effect on their friendship. Even so, she gave herself a little shake and considered Margaret’s question.

“No . . . I mean, she was supposed to go before I did, but I don’t think I saw her go in? One minute she was there, and the next . . .” she trailed off, waving her hand apathetically.

The tension hardened, heated, and uncoiled as pure fear.

This time there was no Major Mason with a sword; her mother was not there to give assurances, to pass down a simple family trinket as the last tangible reminder of her homeland. There were just her schoolmates, who did not know the truth, and her.

Rosie.

Well, it had been going to be Rosie alone soon enough. Might as well get used to it now. Leaving the screening room behind she fled to the door, and tried to summon the elevator.

It did not respond.

There was no time to wait. The dreadful certainty of that was rising inside her, pounding in her head, pushing her out the door and down the stairs, as fast as she could move, down, down, down, all the way to the lobby.

* * *

The lobby was nearly deserted. The few people passing through were in a hurry, and did not stop to look at the odd collection of people making their way to the door. But then, it was a film studio after all. Presumably there was nothing too extraordinary about a girl in stylized peasant dress being escorted to parts unknown by a group that could only be her firing squad.

This was going to work, then. She would escape, Kane would have crossed the line that nobody had been willing to force him over, and Rosie would be safe . . .

“General Kane!”

The cry, sharp, regal, echoed off the marble floors and columns of the lobby. Carter and her escort stopped and jerked around to see Rosie standing in front of a doorway set off to the side. She was breathing rapidly, her shoulders moving up and down after what must have been a breathtaking flight down the stairs.

Even gasping for breath, she held herself like she knew who she was, and what she had to do.

General Kane recovered first from his shock.

“What is this country,” he cried, “does everybody want to be a princess?” He turned on Carter, pulling the veil off her face and tossing it aside in disgust. “You would not want to be a princess once you knew what fate lay in store for this one.”

Carter shook her head, frantic, afraid not for herself but for Rosie.

“What are you doing,” she said plaintively, “Rosie, you shouldn’t have. I had it all planned, it was working perfectly!”

Rosie advanced, measured step by measured step, and smiled through her tears.

“Carter, this was a very brave plan. And you are the truest, most wonderful . . .” She stopped. Fought the tremor in her voice. Got it under control and pushed on.

“This is mine to finish. It’s not your fight.”

Carter shook her head. She knew with painful clarity what it must have felt like for her father to watch the home of a woman he loved fall to ash and memory. She was seeing it play out before her, an inescapable future, and she’d been so sure she could stop it . . .

“There are still laws, Rosie. We’re not—not _there_. He’s not in charge here, you don’t have to go with him.”

“Enough.” A fist wrapped around her wrist and wrenched her arm up behind her back. The sharp point of pain at her elbow jerked a shriek from Carter, and she nearly went to her knees. But Kane was not watching her; he was watching Rosie.

“The princess is correct. This is not your fight. And I think she will do what is necessary to keep it that way. Am I right?”

Rosie bowed her head.

“Very good.” He released Carter with a suddenness that sent her reeling into the man who had watched her a little too carefully before. “Dmitry, please keep the young lady company long enough to ensure that Princess Rosalinda intends to honor her word. You will join us at the pier in one hour.”

Dmitry’s hand settled on her shoulder but Carter hardly felt it. She stared helpless, horrified, as Kane offered Rosie his arm with all the gallantry of a royal escort. She rested her fingertips on his elbow with a visible cringe, and they walked toward the door. The other three fell in beside and behind them, and Carter looked around in hopeless desperation for anybody who could stop them.

The answer to her prayer did not come from inside the lobby, but rather entered at the front door. One moment it was empty, showing a clear path to the street. The next it was darkened with the press of bodies and an easy dozen people, dressed in a sort of approximation of military gear, stepped through the door. Front and center were Carter’s father, still in his street clothes, and the Director, as neatly and precisely dressed as Rosie in a plain, dark gown.

Carter’s heart leaped at the sight.

“Dad!” she sobbed, and he spared her a sharp look before redirecting his focus to the problem immediately in front of him.

“General Kane,” the Director was saying politely. “I know you by reputation only, but I think you have had the pleasure of Major Mason’s acquaintance?”

Joe inclined his head.

“Good to see you again, General.”

“What is the meaning of this?” the general blustered. “You are interfering with official business of the sovereign land of Costa Luna!”

“Not quite,” the Director said, still exquisitely correct in her posture and address. Her attention flicked briefly to Carter. “The young woman who is currently in the custody of your lieutenant is a complicated personage, politically speaking. America has vouchsafed her protection on an international level, and I am very much afraid that by your interference here, in this manner, you have breached a number of treaties. We will be turning you over to international authorities until the matter can be resolved to the satisfaction of all parties.”

She punctuated this declaration with a brittle smile.

General Kane was ready to argue. He dropped his elbow from under Rosie’s hand and took her by the shoulder.

“This girl is in my custody. I am here on my own authority to return her to the people of her kingdom and the trial that awaits her there. The other matter is unimportant.”

Carter, in terms of perspective, was inclined to agree. Nothing mattered more to her at that moment than securing Rosie’s safety.

“Dad!” she cried. She pulled free of the hand on her shoulder and rushed forward. “You can’t let him—”

She didn’t make it past General Kane. His arm was around her waist in an instant, and he jerked her back against him, proof against any effort to use one of the weapons drawn in the doorway.

Time slowed. The lobby seemed to shift out of focus and drop away until it was just Carter, the General, and her father.

The General tightened his grip on her waist, watching for any threat of reaction. Her dad very carefully, very conspicuously, did not move.

“Well, Major? I have come a very long way. I have left everything behind. If it is lost to me now then so be it.” He pulled Carter back so her body melded against his. “And yet even so, I think you have much more to lose than I.”

“So do I,” said Rosie.

She reached up to the subtle knot of hair at the back of her head, drawing a skewer of improbable length free of the coil. Her hair cascaded down around her like a cape as she drove the stiletto deep between the third and fourth buttons of the General’s uniform.

He staggered, and Carter seized the moment to pull free, this time grabbing Rosie as she did. They pressed back against the wall as the Program operatives swarmed, covering all five men with devastating efficiency.

Rosie trembled violently in Carter’s embrace.

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Carter murmured, soothing her with nonsense, stroking the half-coiled tangle of her hair. “See, it’s all right, they have him. It’s all over, Rosie. You’re free.”

Everything in the lobby thinned out dramatically as the operatives removed their prisoners. Two soldiers, Joe and the Director were soon all that remained of the confrontation . . . but another one was brewing.

Carter, seeing her father’s attention shift back toward her, cringed.

“I am in _so_ much trouble,” she whispered, half fearful, half awestruck. Rosie gave her hand an encouraging squeeze. Before Joe could speak, the Director beat him to it.

“Miss Mason. A very complicated scheme, I must say.”

“You found it, though?” Carter said, almost smug. “I thought you would. I knew you’d know I’d been there. You always told me it’s more—”

“—fortified than it seems, yes. And you were not careful.”

“I wasn’t trying to be,” Carter protested, hurt. “I only didn’t want you to catch me while I was there.”

“What are you talking about?” Rosie wanted to know, and in reply the Director held up a sheet of paper.

“Codes and protocols for reaching out to our contact in your government—a Señor Manuel Elegante. Very obliging fellow. Impressive diversity of résumé . . . almost frighteningly loyal to you, your highness. Miss Mason left this in her own file, directly on top of _this_.”

She presented a second page.

“The terms of the international treaties which govern Miss Mason’s status as a stateless princess. They are extensive. It took us over a decade to resolve them to the satisfaction of all parties.”

“I nearly can’t leave the country at all,” Carter said almost cheerfully. “International waters only. And somebody trying to actually _take_ me out of here, especially if he were acting on behalf of another country, would be basically grounds for a war. I didn’t think it would matter much whether he knew who I was or not.”

Rosie shook her head.

“The risk you took—”

“It was the same one you were going to take,” Carter shot back. “Only mine was a risk that could actually fix it all.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“You’d never have let me do it.”

Rosie had to admit she was probably right.

Then the Director, with consummate tact, indicated to Rosie that she would like to speak with her more privately. They drew off to the side together, leaving Joe to confront his daughter.

He seemed a full ten years older than when she’d left him that morning, and Carter was miserably conscious of guilt as he stared down at her, furious beyond expression.

“What the hell were you thinking, Carter?”

She tugged at the skirt of her costume.

“I was thinking it was about time I made the whole not-a-princess thing work for me. If he took me, you could get him, and Rosie would be safe to go home.”

“Why didn’t you just come to me?”

“The same reason I didn’t tell Rosie. You’d never have let me. I knew the Director would see why it would work, though, especially if I’d already set most of it up. So . . . I went for it.”

“You’re just lucky she put it together in time. She wouldn’t even tell me the full extent of it, but this morning I knew there was something going on, and it was all I could do not to lock you in your room. Orders be damned. Don’t you realize how lucky you—” he stopped. Regained control with visible effort.

“What if I hadn’t been here?”

She smiled, just a little.

“I knew you would be. I mean, not _here_. I thought you’d be at the pier after I jumped off the boat. But . . . you rescue princesses. It’s what you do.”

“Apparently I’m not the only one,” he said. And they both spared a smile for Rosie. Then he put his hand out, knuckles offered, to bump them gently against hers.

“You’n me, pal.”

“Yeah, Dad,” she squeezed his hand, “you’n me.”

Her father wrapped her against him with one arm, and without even needing to be prompted, put his other arm out to welcome Rosie too.

* * *

Princess Rosalinda Marie Montoya Fiore finished her year of high school in New York City, then took a ship home to put her kingdom to rights.

Or rather, to put her kingdom to bed, and turn it into something new.

It would not be easy. Transferring the balance of power from a head of state to a parliamentary government is not the work of weeks or even months. It took two years of referendums to even get matters to the point that things could be voted on.

While she was away, the American stock market entered a freefall. The world changed. But the ideal Rosie had carried home with her did not let go, not any more than her desire to keep everything she had found in her new life. It was the most selfish she would ever be in her entire life and she wanted to do it right.

Carter began studies at Vassar. Rosie did too, but on a modified program that allowed her to return home for longer stretches and monitor the progress there.

Even a world apart, they kept in touch. They telegrammed what was fit for public consumption and, with incomplete discretion, wrote down what was not. Private couriers ferried letters whose contents would have set the civilized world on fire back and forth across the ocean as two girls planned their future together, dreaming in scandalous detail of a day when there was no longer an ocean between them.

It took another year and a half for the first election to be arranged and completed. The whole thing was very new to the people of Costa Luna, and Rosie was painfully conscious of how much she was asking of all of them.

What a risk she wanted them to take, so much for her own sake.

But in January of 1931, Costa Luna held its first democratic election and appointed the idealistic young politician (and former head of wardrobe and protocol to the Royal Household) Manuel Elegante the first prime minister of the new República de Costa Luna.

Rosie hugged him, and cried.

“Not in public, my _princesa_ ,” he chided fondly. “So unsightly. And look, you will ruin this dress with your tears. Though maybe not such a loss, as it is very American, and not half so fine as any I have made for you.”

Rosie cried harder. He did not scold her twice.

She stayed for the first round of celebrations that followed. She was warmly conscious of Major Mason standing quietly in the shadows, and her mother, rather more prominent in her role. Queen Sofia would be pensioned off generously and retain a comfortable property for her personal use. She had assured her daughter this was more than enough, and as for herself, Rosie did not ask even half as much.

Rosie did not retain her title, though there were some in the new parliament who argued that she should. She did not retain rights to any property beyond some personal items she had selected from the palace for sentimental reasons. She accepted only funds sufficient to pay for her schooling, and a pension far less generous than her mother’s. Ultimately she had been obliged to make a speech over the new wireless broadcasting service to assure her former subjects that these were not unusually cruel deprivations meted out by Parliament; they were her own choice, that she might begin life as a private citizen and leave as much as wealth as possible at the disposal of Costa Luna.

“You are beginning a new chapter,” she explained into the round drum of the microphone. She remembered vividly the first time she had done this; the speech she had made then. It had been the forerunner of the speech she made today; the company she’d had then, a foretaste of the company that would soon be hers.

“All of this is strange, I know. It will require the goodwill of all citizens to make this the best part of your story. Mistakes will be made. Sometimes you will need to go back and . . . rewrite a few pages. Such revision may be costly. I could not in good conscience take money away that will aid you in the construction of the best future imaginable for all citizens of Costa Luna.

“In the name of the memory of my father, I ask that you understand me. It is my wish to leave this gift to you, as I know it would have been his wish, too.”

What she declined to tell them was that the one thing she wanted, she already had . . . or at least, soon would. But Carter was not there for the celebrations; not only was it still a delicate proposition for her to enter any country other than her own, she also had examinations coming up, and Rosie insisted that they must come first.

She was on the ship, though. At the end of the initial round of parties, her speeches made, all appropriate documents signed in triplicate, Rosie packed her own luggage and made her way to the pier. She took a tender out to international waters and boarded the ship as Señorita Rosalinda Fiore, a fully private citizen, eager to meet another fully private citizen in the full privacy of their room.

Carter was waiting in their stateroom, sprawled on the bed when Rosie arrived, her schoolbooks open all over the covers, a frown pulling her forehead into deep crinkles as she gathered information for her latest paper.

When Rosie entered, though, Carter left her books behind, leaping up from the bed and flying across the floor to meet her. In an instant Rosie remembered seeing her like this, the first time ever, in the third-floor apartment of a house that no longer existed. New York had had its way with that block, as New York always would. A grand apartment building rose in its stead, gleaming and modern, ready for whatever tomorrow would bring.

But Carter’s arms around her neck were not the memory of a lost day. They were here, and now, and real.

“Hi,” Carter breathed.

“Hi,” Rosie whispered back.

Their eyes met and they broke into giggles.

“Kiss me,” Rosie suggested, and Carter was so taken with the idea she obeyed a dozen times to the one request.

“So,” Carter mused after she broke the final kiss, teasing an errant tendril of Rosie’s hair, “do you feel any different, now that you’re not a princess anymore?”

Rosie’s eyes danced and she drew herself up in mock indignation.

“ _Not_ a princess? How _dare_ you. Carter Mason once I’ve had my way with you, I swear before Heaven that you will call me princess, queen and goddess beside.”

“Ooh,” Carter flopped back on the pillows, a willing conquest of such feudal spirit. “I like the sound of _that_.”

And she spread her legs in languid anticipation of the long trip home.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for the chance to write these two! I had such a lot of fun with them; I hope you enjoyed them too.
> 
> Happy Yuletide!


End file.
